Spring Hill Presbyterian Church

From the Honey Grove Signal-Citizen, April 15, 1960  [photos are below]

​Pictured above is the abandoned and rapidly deteriorating Spring Hill Presbyterian Church.  Once an edifice of beauty, fulfilling the needs of a place to worship for a thickly populated rural area, the building now is a grotesque's owl's and birds roost.

The area around the church, some three or four miles north of Windom, is only sparsely inhabited - a victim of depleted soil, farm mechanization and the shifting of population to metropolitan areas.

At right is the old Spring Hill School, once classed as one of the finest schools in the county, and which attracted children from a wide area.

There has been no school here in many years.  The school on property adjoining the church is now used by the church for Sunday School services and occasional church services.  A few years back, the Spring Hill Church was one of a group of churches comprising the North Texas Larger Parish of the Paris Presbytery of the Presbyterian church U.S.A., and regular worship services were held once or twice a month, the the larger Psrish plan was abandoned two or three years ago.

The Spring Hill Church is in the immediate area of the first Presbyterian Church to be erected in Fannin County.  This first church was a log structure located in the Smyrna community between Lannius and Spring Hill.

There is quite an interesting history we are told about the Smyrna and Spring Hill Churches, only smatterings of which we have been able to assemble.  There only remains at Smyrna a burial ground.  The church building and any other buildings that may have been there have long since disappeared.

According to information given us around 1879 there were two George Smiths living in the area of Lannius, Smyrna and Spring Hill.  To distinguish between them, one George Smith was called "Timber" because he lived in the wooded section of the area and the other "Prairie" as his home was in the prairie section.

The Smyrna congregation divided in 1870 and George "Prairie" Smith gave the Spring Hill group a ninety-nine year lease of the land on which the church now stands.  George "Timber" Smith along with the balance of the Smyrna congregation formed a Presbyterian church at Lannius.

Among the charter members of the Spring Hill Church was the late Frank and Mick Stevens.  A descendant of one of the Smith's in the early day Spring Hill church is William Smith who resides north of Windom.

Sometime after 1960 the Spring Hill Presbyterian Church building was moved to a nearby farm, and still survives (as of 2014). Below is a wonderful color photo of what remains of one stained glass window.