BETHEL, TEXAS (Gregg County). Bethel, one and a half miles northeast of Gladewater in northwestern Gregg County, was established in the mid-1840s and grew up around the Bethel Baptist Church. A local school was founded later and continued to operate until the early twentieth century. The community, however, began to decline after the Civil Warqv and disappeared around the 1870s. The church became the present First Baptist Church of Gladewater. In the 1990s the site was located on the northeastern edge of Gladewater.
bibliography: Eugene W. McWhorter, Traditions of the Land: The History of Gregg County (Longview, Texas: Gregg County Historical Foundation, 1989).
Christopher Long
