CAMP COUNTY - REEVES CHAPEL

32.574207     -95.116136

Reeves Chapel is on Farm Road 1519 four miles southwest of Pittsburg in southwestern Camp County. The area was originally settled in the 1850s, probably first by Georgian Elijah Bailey and his family. Another early settler from Georgia, Counce Reeves, was clearing his land when a tree fell on a worker and killed him. Reeves then decided to donate land for a cemetery in which to bury the worker. In 1879 Reeves donated two acres of land adjacent to the cemetery for the building of a Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the community came to be known as Reeves Chapel. The original church was a simple structure approximately thirty feet wide and sixty feet deep. In 1905 that church was replaced with a more elaborate structure that was still standing in 1983. By 1960 the rural population of Camp County had fallen sharply, and most of the houses in the Reeves Chapel community had been abandoned.