Recommended, with reservations

Historic Churches of Texas: The Land and The People, Frank A. Driskill and Noel Grisham. Burnet, TX: Eakin Press, 1980

This is a book about churches in Texas, and their church buildings. I was excited when I found I could borrow this book at Archive.Org. The excitement quickly dissipated, and overall I was sadly disappointed. The work contains many mistakes, some perhaps of only a typographical nature, but others are errors in fact. For example:

• On page 1, Driskill and Grisham introduce the famous Baptist preacher Z. N. Morrel (sic). When they refer to him again on page 3, he becomes J. N. Morrell. On the same page (3), the real Isaac Reed becomes “Isaac Read,” J. S. Milstead is “J. M. Milstead,” and M. Melton becomes “W. Melton.” If there are this many typographical errors in the first three pages, no doubt the book is filled with them. 
• The name Union Church is claimed to be so because the house was used by Baptists, Methodists, and Primitive Baptists (a sort of “union,” I suppose). On the other hand, the house itself already had name – Liberty School House – and there is no evidence of any Methodists or Primitive Baptists meeting there in 1838 when the Union Baptist Church was formed. Union is the name of the church – the congregation – not the building.
• The constitution of this church, the first of its kind in East Texas, was a “union” of Baptist believers in covenant, organized by a presbytery of ordained Baptist ministers. It took that name at its very beginning, in the conference conducted after the church was constituted – “Church met for business – chose bro. Green moderator, -- named the church Union…” The church, not the building. No other explanation need be devised.
• At the bottom of page 3 we “learn” that the “earlier migrant Pilgrim Baptist Church was organized near Nacogdoches in 1824.” Actually the “migrant Pilgrim Baptist Church” was organized in Illinois in 1833, and moved as a congregation to Texas, arriving in January 1834.

I have some questions about which churches were chosen, and which were left out, and why, but I suppose that is a matter of an author’s purpose and perspective. There is some interesting stuff in this book, all collected in one place. Nevertheless, the reader should be keenly aware that, because of the nature of some of the mistakes, that details must be verified by more reliable sources. Read with caution, and check the work.