In 1948, the headline blazed across the Chicago Daily Tribune’s front page, “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Israel became an independent state and the Olympics were held once more, this time in
St. Moritz, .
Dallas was a city of fewer than half a million. The area north of Northwest Highway was mostly fields, but in 1948, eight hardy souls met with Presbytery officials about starting a new church somewhere in that grassy area.
1949 gave us both Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Murphy’s Law, and William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature. On October 20, 1949, Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church was established and called the Rev. Robert (Manny)
Douglass as its first pastor.
Senator Margaret Chase Smith wrote her Declaration of Conscience against McCarthyism in 1950 and Gloria Swanson prepared for her close up in the movie Sunset Boulevard. And in January of 1950, charter membership for PHPC was completed with 109 signers. Within the first year, church membership reached 223. Services were held at the
Texas
Country
Day School, now St. Mark’s
School of
Texas.
Some years before all of this, the Presbytery had purchased acreage at Tibbs and Stichter streets to set aside for future churches. The land was given to the new PHPC. A group of far-sighted church members, however, exchanged the original land for an acre at Preston and
Aberdeen, seeing it as a better site for the budding church. The first building campaign was launched in 1951 and evidenced the extraordinary dedication of our first church members, as they placed their own homes as guarantees against the mortgage used to begin construction.
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