Presbyterian Church

Presbyterians started moving into Texas from the United States in the 1820s, and Milton Estell established the first Presbyterian Church in Texas near Clarksville in 1833. Although Cumberland Presbyterian missionary Sumner Bacon first entered Texas in 1829, the first Cumberland Presbyterian church did not organize until 1837. By the 1840s, the Cumberland Synod of Texas in Nacogdoches began to spread its evangelistic policy throughout the state.

Peter H. Fullenwider, one of Stephen F. Austin’s original 300 settlers, became the first minister of the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America (PCUSA) to move to Texas in 1834. This denomination split in 1837 into the Old School and New School sects. Fullenwider was an Old School preacher, as was Hugh Wilson, who established Bethel Presbyterian Church, the first Old School church in Texas, near San Augustine in 1838. Over the next few decades, several Old School churches and synods sprang up in Texas, and by 1854, the first New School presbytery was also established. At the start of the Civil War in 1861, most churches within the two sects joined together in the South to form the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America (PCCSA). The PCCSA renamed itself to the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) following the war, but a few of the PCCSA churches joined the PCUSA instead.

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