Elias Dibble

Elias Dibble (1811-1885) was a Black Methodist minister in Houston before and after the Civil War and one of the men credited with helping to raise money for the purchase of Emancipation Park.

Enslaved in Houston, Dibble had likely gained experience as an exhorter among the Methodist Church’s Black congregants, who for ten years before the Civil War had their own wooden building on the lot of First Methodist Church at Texas and Milam. That wooden building was briefly rented for a time by the white congregation after its own, larger building collapsed in 1860. By the end of the war, the white congregation was borrowing the Lutheran church for its services, returning the wooden chapel to the use of Dibble’s congregation. Then, according to israel1998, “Several members of the African Mission (Methodist) met with their black pastor Elias Dibble on March 5, 1865, at the home of Richard Brock to organize a church independent from First Methodist’s oversight.” Dibble traveled to New Orleans in December 1865, was appointed a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church (North), and then returned with an assignment to minister for the denomination in Houston.¹

In October 1865, along with Shade Croome and Peter Jackson as officers and the aid of Rev. W. R. Fayle, he founded a “Mutual Aid Society” in Houston; the Telegraph printed the society’s preamble.²

On the evening of December 17, 1865, the church elected its borad of trustees as Peter Noble, Charles Chapman, Frank Vance, Edwin Brooks, Samuel Noble, and John Sessums, recording the vote in the Harris County Deed Books under Elias Dibble’s legal mark on February 15, 1866.³

From 1866 City Directory:

The Freedmen’s Methodist church was formerly included among the colored missions of the M. E. Church, South, but, since the war, the congregation has connected itself with the M. E. Church, North. Rev. Elias Dibble, a colored minister, is the present pastor. He has long been known in our city, and enjoys the respect and confidence of our citizens. A Sunday School is likewise connected with this charge.

On February 7, 1866, a deed was recorded in Harris County transferring Block 319 to Dibble and the “Trustees of African Church.” C. C. Speers, in exchange for $1200 “to me paid and to be paid by Elias Dibble preacher in charge and Charles Chatman, John Sessums, Peter Jackson, Peter Noble, Edward Brooks, Frank Vance, & Sam Noble Trustees of the African Methodist Church of Houston.” Mentions that the trustees hold two notes for $300 each to be payable to Speers in six and twelve months respectively in gold, with 10 percent interest.⁴

Later, in 1879, the trustees sued Charles C. Speers in District Court, with Dibble, Vance, and S. M. Williams giving evidence that “they are trustees of the Methodist Episcopal Church” and had purchased Block 319 from the defendant, but that “by mistake of the parties the title was taken by the said Trustees in the name of the African Methodist Church” when it was intended to be conveyed to the group as trustees. The purchase money had been paid off in full, and the judge ruled in the plaintiffs favor that the title be corrected and divested out of the African Methodist Church and vested in the trustees. The lien held by Speers is also discharged. Recorded April 9, 1880.⁵

The directory details the collapse of the ME Church South building in 1860, after which the congregation initially “rented the African church, located on the adjoining lot, but since the war have been occupying the Lutheran church, twice on Sunday, through the courtesy of that body.”⁶

An article in the Daily Union in April 1869, written by a correspondent from Galveston, suggests that Elias Dibble was then living and preaching there.⁷