Ward Prairie Baptist Church - Freestone County, TX
N 31° 45.968 W 096° 08.307
14R E 771023 N 3518079
The Ward Prairie Baptist Church is in the old Ward Prairie community at 341 FM 488, about four miles northeast of Fairfield in rural Freestone County. Sunday services are at 11 AM.
Waymark Code: WM162D1
Location: Texas, United States
Date Posted: 04/19/2022
Views: 2
A 1986 Texas Historical Marker provides some history:
Ward Prairie, named for an early pioneer family, was the site of Lake Chapel Methodist Church as early as the 1860s. The chapel, on land donated by another pioneer family, was used as a meeting place for other denominations, as well. Ward Prairie Baptist Church, officially organized in 1869 under the direction of the Rev. J.C. Averitt, met in the Methodist chapel until 1893, when land two miles south was given to the church by the J.W. Orand family. The Lake Chapel Methodist congregation had been consolidated with another area church in the mid-1880s, and, according to local tradition, the chapel building was moved here and became the Ward Prairie Baptist Church.
Membership in the church has varied over the years. Originally meeting only once a month, the congregation held services twice monthly beginning in 1952, and soon began to worship together each Sunday. Various events have combined to change the structure of the Ward Prairie community, but this church has continued to survive despite economic difficulties and area population shifts.
A good example of a rural Texas church, Ward Prairie Baptist Church has been an integral part of the community's heritage for over a century.
If that is the chapel from the 1860s, it has undergone significant modifications. Other than a few web-spidered directory listings, this church has no Internet presence. A USGenWeb page, written some time after 2001, notes that the church was part of the Trinity River Association in 1878, and the name "Peter Kirvin" comes up as a pastor just a few years later (1883) when the church was part of the Prairie Grove Baptist Association. There is no indication as to whether he was related to the family whose name lives on in the Freestone city some miles northwest of here. By 1884, the congregation was up to 84 members, but in 1886, something unspecified occurred in which twenty members were dismissed, taking the head count down to 58. By 1889, they were back to eighty members, and not long after, the narrative jumps to the historical marker, mentioning that they were preparing to build the fellowship hall which you can partially see in the photos.