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SAND BRANCH CHURCH, TEXAS. Sand Branch Church is in northwestern Atascosa County on Farm Road 2504, three miles north of State Highway 173 and sixteen miles west of Jourdanton. It was named for a local creek that a congregation of Baptists settled on around 1870. The original group had twelve members and officially organized as a church on August 27, 1882. They met monthly under a brush arbor near the local school. By 1886 the congregation had fifty members. The first sanctuary was completed in 1904 on four acres donated by W. W. Davidson. It included a cemetery. Though the Sand Branch school had forty-eight students in 1914, it no longer existed by the late 1930s, when the site was marked by the church, the cemetery, and a few scattered dwellings. In 1959 new church facilities were constructed near the original site. During the 1980s the church had some 157 members from the surrounding area. A Texas Historical Commission^qv marker was placed at the site of the old Sand Branch Baptist Church in 1982.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Margaret G. Clover, The Place Names of Atascosa County (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1952). Marker Files, Texas Historical Commission, Austin.

Linda Peterson

The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this article.

Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. "," http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/SS/hrscg.html (accessed November 23, 2008).

(NOTE: "s.v." stands for sub verbo, "under the word.")

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Last Updated: January 18, 2008
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