Bridges Chapel

Bridges Chapel is on U.S. Highway 271 8½; miles northwest of Mount Pleasant in northwestern Titus County. It grew around a Methodist church constructed at the site sometime around the Civil War and named Bridges Chapel, after Relious Bridges, who donated the land for the church and the adjacent cemetery. In 1870 the members of the community built a school named Stonewall that initially offered a high school program, but by 1932 offered only nine grades. By 1932 the community had a school for black children that offered instruction through grade seven. Improvements in transportation and a decline in the rural population of the county, however, forced the consolidation of the Stonewall school with the Mount Pleasant Independent School District. In 1984 Bridges Chapel had a church, a cemetery, a community center, and a few widely scattered houses. In 2000 the population was ninety.