Christ Church, Nacogdoches
(936) 564-0421
1420 Mound St.
Nacogdoches, TX
Service Times
Sunday Mornings: 8am & 10:30am
Wednesday Mornings: 11:15am
Christ Church is the oldest Protestant Church in Nacogdoches, the oldest town in Texas.
Becoming the eighth and ninth churches in the 1839 Diocese of Texas, Christ Church Nacogdoches and Christ Church San Augustine were organized in April 1848 by then-deacon Henry Sansom, who was ordained in January 1849. The first Episcopal service in Nacogdoches was held in the Courthouse on June 14, 1848. The first vestry included Frost Thorne and Hayden Edwards, who both were instrumental in establishing the Republic of Texas in 1836 and then the State of Texas in 1845; they are interred in Nacogdoches’s historic Oak Grove Cemetery.
In 1851, work began on a wood frame church building fronting a lane which runs north from Main Street in downtown Nacogdoches. The work was fully completed in 1854, and since that time, the lane has been called Church Street. In 1902, the Reverend George Crocket, with vestryman architect and builder Dietrich Rulfs, oversaw construction of a new brick church on the southwest corner of the Nacogdoches University campus. This building was dismantled, reassembled, and enlarged in 1939 on parishioners’ land adjacent to the campus of Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College. In 1947, a parish house was added by parishioner and architect Hal B. Tucker (whose daughter is a current, 2020 communicant). Also in 1947, Christ Episcopal School was founded as the first protestant private school in Nacogdoches. In 1983, Christ Church constructed a separate Christ Episcopal School building on the church campus, designed by Tucker protégés, Carl Maynard and John O. Greer. In 1990, the sanctuary was extended with a choir loft to accommodate a pipe organ, and a new narthex entry was added. This addition, in the original Rulfs style, was designed by parishioner and architect John Hill (whose wife is a current, 2020 communicant). In 2013, the parish house was renovated; the work was overseen by two parishioners, the architect Jerry Sutton and the contractor John Kingham.
Rev. George Crocket, a San Augustine native, served Christ Church from 1888 until 1908 and again from 1926 until 1930. He was a respected historian, history professor emeritus at Stephen F. Austin State College, and author of Two Centuries in East Texas, still a definitive history of early Texas. Crocket carved the altar, pulpit, and hymn board the Church still uses. In 2016, a bronze statue of Crocket on the west lawn of Christ Church along Mound Street was dedicated by the parish and the Friends of Historic Nacogdoches.
The Past Rectors of Christ Church
The Reverend Henry Samson (1849-1854)
The Reverend C. H. Albert (1855-1856)
The Reverend John Owen (1857-1864)
The Reverend D.A.B. Treader (1864-1865)
The Reverend Alexander Dobb (1865-1869)
The Reverend R. D. Shindler (1869-1887)
The Reverend Charles H. B. Turner (1887-1888)
The Reverend George Louis Crocket (1888-1908)
The Reverend T. J. Sloan (1909-1912)
The Reverend Jeptha H. Swann (1913-1915)
The Reverend Charles D. Atwell (1916-1926)
The Reverend George Louis Crocket (1926-1930)
The Reverend Hugh St. George Murray (1930-1933)
The Reverend Orin G. Helvey (1933-1942)
The Reverend William Landless Shannon (1943-1945)
The Reverend Scott Field Bailey (1946-1950, later Bishop of West Texas)
The Reverend H. Raymond Kearby (1951-1959)
The Reverend John Desel (1959-1967)
The Reverend Michael C. Macey (1967-1973)
The Reverend William V. Kegler (1973-1976)
The Reverend Jack Godfrey Murray (1977-1982)
The Reverend Douglas J. Tucker (1983-1992)
The Reverend Frank B. Mangum (1993-1996)
The Reverend Reginald Thomas Milburn (1996-1998, interim)
The Reverend Gary Dixon Hill (1997-2010)
The Reverend David J. Greer (2010-2011, interim)
The Reverend Howard G. Castleberry (2011-2019)
The Reverend Frank W. Hughes (2019-2020, interim)
The Reverend Karl E. Griswold-Kuhn (2020-present)
This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is available for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the East Texas Research Center at asketrc@sfasu.edu
The First Vestry
The first Vestry included Judge Amos Clark, who gave $500 in gold to build the church, Frost Thorn (the first Texas millionaire), who donated the land, Col. Hayden Edwards (leader of the Fredonia Rebellion against Mexico, 1826), and Judge Richard S. Walker.
Noted Past Members
Judge William Beck Ochiltree
by L. Tuffly Ellis, 1991
18 Oct. 1811–27 Dec. 1867
William Beck Ochiltree, lawyer and public official, was born in Fayetteville. The only person of this name recorded in the 1810 census for the county was Elizabeth Ochiltree, whose household consisted of four females and one slave, but no male. Young Ochiltree went first to the Florida Territory and then to Alabama, where he studied law. After practicing for a time in Alabama, he moved to the Republic of Texas in 1839, continuing his law practice. In 1842 he was appointed judge of the Fifth Judicial District, a position that also made him an ex officio judge of the Texas Supreme Court. During the administration of President Anson Jones (1844–45), Ochiltree served first as secretary of the Treasury (1844) and then as attorney general (1845).
Ochiltree wrote a series of articles for the San Augustine (Tex.) Red-Lander opposing the annexation of Texas to the United States. During the annexation and constitutional convention of 1845, he served as a delegate from Nacogdoches County and participated in the writing of the Texas state constitution of the same year. After the convention he again served as a judge but resigned to return to private law practice.
While working to bring about a two-party system in Texas, Ochiltree was a leader of the state's Whig party. He ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Congress from the Eastern District of Texas in 1851 and finished second in the gubernatorial race in 1853. Two years later, he was elected a member of the sixth Texas legislature. Ochiltree also served as a delegate to the Texas Secession Convention in 1861 from Harrison County, to which he had moved in 1859. He went to Montgomery, Ala., in 1861 as a delegate and member of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America but resigned and returned to Texas to organize an infantry regiment for General John G. Walker's Division. Ill health in 1863 forced him to resign his commission, and he returned to Texas. He died in Jefferson, Tex., four years later
James Harper Starr (December 18, 1809 – July 25, 1890) served as a commissioner of the Texas General Land Office and later Secretary of the Treasury of the Republic of Texas and also as director of the postal service of the Trans-Mississippi Department of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War as well as the namesake of Starr County in Texas.
After the defeat of the Confederacy, Starr was barred from serving in public office, as were most Confederate officials. His eldest son's home in Marshall, Texas, "Maplecroft", was designated a state historic site in the 1970s and is open to the public.
HENRY RAGUET (1796–1877).Henry Raguet, early Nacogdoches merchant and member of the Committee of Vigilance and Safety, son of James Michael and Ann (Wynkoop) Raguet, was born on February 11, 1796, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He served in the war of 1812, was discharged in Philadelphia in 1814, and soon moved with his wife, née Marcia Ann Towers, to Cincinnati, Ohio. There Raguet was in business for some time and was elected a director of the Bank of the United States in 1827. His business failed, however, and after his discharge from bankruptcy, probably in February 1833, he made a trip to New Orleans, Louisiana, where he became acquainted with Sam Houston and John M. Durst, who induced him to make a trip with them to Texas. They reached Nacogdoches sometime in March 1833, and Raguet accompanied Durst to his ranch home on the Angelina River. After deciding to make his home in Texas, he returned to Ohio by way of Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he made the acquaintance of a struggling young merchant, William G. Logan, to whom he described Texas in such glowing colors that Logan also decided to move to Texas. The Raguet and Logan families proceeded together to Nacogdoches, where the firm of Logan and Raguet began its mercantile business. On December 10, 1835, Raguet was appointed treasurer of the Nacogdoches Committee of Vigilance and Safety; later he was chairman. On February 9, 1837, he was appointed postmaster of Nacogdoches. He retired in 1852 and continued to live in Nacogdoches until 1873, then moved to Marshall. He died there on December 8, 1877, and was buried there.
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| Photograph. Frederick Voigt, 11th Legislature, By the Austin Photograph Co., Prints and Photographs Collection, [identifier number: di_03923, di_03924], The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin |
Frederick Voigt, Nacogdoches civic leader, state senator, and Texas state custodian of public property, son of Frederick William and Wilhelmina Voigt, was born on September 4, 1825, in Germany. Accompanied by his brother William, he immigrated to Texas before 1849. In that year, in partnership with Thomas Rimmele, a baker, he bought land from empresario Haden Edwards on Lanana Bayou south of Nacogdoches, on which was a water-operated grist and saw mill. His sister Mary, brother Henry, and parents, all born in Germany, were also in Nacogdoches. The parents died in Jefferson, Texas. Voigt married Elizabeth Holloway on December 19, 1855; they had three children. After Elizabeth Voigt died in 1866, Voigt married Elizabeth Muirhead Howell Hancock in 1868; they had a daughter. Voigt served three times as mayor, was worshipful master of Milam Lodge No. 2 of the Masonic order, and was editor and publisher of the Nacogdoches Chronicle; he was a member of the vestry of Christ Episcopal Church and captain of Company B of the Eighth Regiment of the Nacogdoches volunteers during the Civil War. Voigt was also Nacogdoches postmaster (1854–66) and owner-operator of a general merchandise store and freight depot. He was a trustee of Nacogdoches University and superintendent of the Nacogdoches Sunday school. In 1866 he was elected by more than an 80 percent majority to the state Senate from the Third District and was introduced to Governor James W. Throckmorton by a letter of James Harper Starr. Four years later Voigt bought the Starr homestead on North Street when the Starrs moved to Marshall, Texas. He was forced out of the Senate when it was ruled that Confederate officers could not hold elective offices. By 1874 he was back in Austin serving as state librarian and in charge of all public property; he reported to the governor the condition of the Capitol and state buildings and made recommendations for their repair and maintenance. In October 1875 he completed a water well on the Capitol grounds. In an advertisement he offered himself as translator of German and his services in presenting clients' problems to the proper state agencies. On August 25, 1880, while returning to Nacogdoches from Marion, where he was electioneering, Voigt and his horse drowned as he attempted to ford the swollen Angelina River. The spot to this day is referred to as Dutchman's Crossing. He is buried in Oak Grove cemetery.
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