The city’s Historic Sites Department can be reached at 93 or by email at Edwards contributed to this report.Cruz called eliminating ICE “radical” and “nuts.”Īs he left a town hall in Hillsboro, about 160 miles away from where Cruz made his comments 18 hours earlier, O’Rourke said he does not want to eliminate ICE. “We have a few pictures of this church and when I saw a few, I mean maybe five.” “Pictures, stories, news articles - if you went to church there, please share that with us,” Sowell said. On the museum side, Sowell said the Historic Sites Department continues to seek photos and documents related to its past use to be used in a permanent exhibit. “We want this to be a building the community can use, just like it was when it was a church,” she said. Plans for the building as an event venue include meetings, reunions, concerts or weddings, Sowell said. “I went in just after they removed the pews, and it looks larger to me,” she said. Although an adult when she last saw the interior, it didn’t seem any smaller, as those of childhood memories often do. She is among those excited to see the church restored. “They would house people in the church that needed a place to come and be safe,” she said On : Cross still stands after fire destroys 100-year-old Texas church She remembers playing in the area behind the parsonage and going to vacation Bible school in the summer at the church, which was sometimes a refuge for coastal residents escaping storms. Justice of the Peace Dorothy Tigner-Thompson grew up just around the corner from Zion Hill and was baptized there at age 5. The church was completed in 1914 at a cost of $7,223 - around $215,000 today.įor nearly 75 years, it was a social and religious center of activity for residents of the Zion Hill neighborhood. Schmidt requested no down payment for the land and financed construction of the new building under Rulfs, his longtime friend and a fellow German immigrant. The church purchased land on Bois d’Arc Street from Nacogdoches businessman John Schmidt, a German immigrant who co-owned Mayer & Schmidt. Reed held the first services under a brush arbor, moving to a wood frame building on Park Street and then to a building on Logansport Street.Īs upper-class white neighborhoods expanded in the 1910s, Zion Hill was pressured to relocate. Lawson Reed, the Zion Hill congregation predates the building on Bois d’Arc Street, its fourth location. “The Victorian homes, any place that Sam Houston set foot in, those get preserved, but not everyday homes.”įounded in 1878 by the Rev. “Those aren’t things you normally see preserved,” Sowell said. Its shotgun- and New Orleans-style homes are largely just as they were in the early 1900s. Residents typically worked in downtown businesses or for affluent white families living on nearby Mound Street. The Zion Hill Historic District grew and developed during the 1880s and 1890s as a Black neighborhood on what was then the northeast edge of Nacogdoches. “Our plan is to focus on the African American history of that region, of the church and the neighborhood around it,” Sowell said. Since then, it has been a work in progress as more grants and donations were raised through the years to restore and repurpose it into a museum and events venue. The historical society deeded the building to the city in 2010. “It’s been a 30-year project, getting this done.”īuilt in 1914 by architect Diedrich Rulfs, the building likely wouldn’t be standing today, Sowell said, if the Nacogdoches County Historical Society had not intervened in the 1990s, raising money and securing grants for major repairs after the church sat vacant and deteriorating for a decade. “As a kid, many times I went to that church, unfortunately more often when it was in disrepair,” said District Judge Jeff Davis, who grew up in Nacogdoches. landscape architect receives national medal for helping preserve African American landmarks Many Nacogdoches natives who grew up admiring the Gothic revival style building were thrilled at the news that a decades-long effort to revitalize and reopen it to the public will soon come to fruition. “Once we do, I’ll be telling everybody about it.” “We are looking at fall of this year, but we don’t have an exact date,” Sowell said. Originally planned to be complete by mid-2022, the $1.6 million renovation project at Zion Hill Church has been affected by two years of supply chain breakdowns and other issues associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nacogdoches daily sentinel