Wagon train brought Baptist pioneers west

Above photo, in the 1930’s, the Gladewater Baptist Church baptized at “the Cotton Gin Pool” near Crooks Store.

From The East Texas Journal, April 2022

By Hudson Old, Publisher

On Christmas 1869, before there were any organized Baptists north of Mt. Pleasant, Texas, a wagon train load of them stopped nine miles north of town, says the “History of Gladewater Baptist Church,” compiled August 14, 1960. They’d been seven weeks on the trail since leaving Alabama.
In March, the congregation celebrated the 150th anniversary of the church’s founding two years after the Alabama Baptists began meeting under a shade tree above a big spring on what was on the Edgar Hays farm when the pastor, church historian and a deacon interviewed J.B. Hammonds of California, Tom Hammonds of Arkansas, L.M. Cargile and Bessie Sloan, both of Mt. Pleasant, and “senior members of the church.

Records prior to the 1930’s are lost, they wrote.
In the minutes written since, the church tracking generations of its families back to the wagon train Baptists has put itself on record as The Missionary Church of Christ Worshipping at Gladewater, The Missionary Baptist Church, The Missionary Baptist Church of Christ and since July, 1948, The First Baptist Church of Gladewater, said Trisha Rice, who can trace family back to the wagon train generation.
.So can a number of the Sunshine Quilters, who meet at the church every Wednesday and have made 230 quilts since October of 1993. They bring their lunch and work most of the day. Their quilt tops are sewn from pieces cut from a selection of bolts of new fabrics collected over years.
Now 93, Mary Jane Tigert is a quilting regular. In times when worn out clothes were cut into quilting pieces, one time when Mary Jane and her sisters took refuge under the covers during a storm, they studied and found they remembered what each piece of the quilt protecting them from the storm had been cut from, whose shirt or skirt or blouse it had been.

It was a comforting exercise, akin to the way the Sunshine Quilters began. A teacher injured in a car wreck and unable to return to the classroom was at a loss. The first gatherings of the Sunshine Quilters was less about quilting than comforting a friend.
The week before the 150th anniversary, pianist Susan Pruitt, who married into the family of members, played Be Thou My Vision when they passed the plate. The sanctuary was half full.
It was packed on the day of the anniversary.
Toward the back, five children between diapers and teens, the younger supplied with coloring books, sat with a mother and grandmother guarding either end of the second to last pew, a troop making it deep into the service before mom pulled one growing restless and noisy out into the foyer.
Nobody’s perfect.
Pastor Tim Williams is a licensed practical nurse and an emergency medical technician. He’s been a volunteer firefighter, a jailer, a peace officer and an insurance salesman, all of that where he grew up, in Colorado.
On a shelf in his office is a photo from his Air Force days. The photo was made when he commanded a joint services color guard during Veterans Day Services at Fort Logan National Cemetery.
On his wall are his initials, fashioned from deer antlers. They’re on his office wall because his wife, Heather, said they would look better there, her way of ordering them out of the house.
On the Sunday that Susan Pruitt played Be Thou My Vision, Pastor Williams announced that Heather would be making venison spaghetti at for the upcoming deacons meeting.
Tim and Heather met in Pittsburg in March of 2020, the last concert before Covid ended his tenure as road manager for the Curtis Grimes Band.

Pastor Williams said he was a Christian in name only before meeting Mr. Grimes, a crossover country and Christian singer whose professional break came in 2011, when he finished among finalists at the end of the first season of The Voice.
He’s been once named the Texas Country Musician of the Year and has had a number one song on the Power Source Christian Country Music Charts.
“Right after we met, we went on a week-long fishing trip,” Pastor Williams said, and told a story of Curtis Grimes work as an apostle on that trip, telling and showing him The Way.
They were together from July of 2019 until March of 2020, when the concert trail led to Pittsburg and Heather, almost a year that he didn’t know until it happened had prepared him to fill the pastor’s slot at Gladewater Baptist, connecting him to a wagon train of Christians who began a church a hundred and fifty years ago.
“I never expected this,” he said, and he smiled.