First Presbyterian Church

This wooden Gothic Revival church’s dominant features are the two front cross gables faced with decorative shingles and featuring tall tripartite lancet arched windows capped with diamond-paned tracery. Anchoring the corner and providing entrance from north and east was a tall bell tower with a steeple, but owing to storm damage around the turn of the twentieth century, a shorter version of the tower remains, rising no higher than the gabled roofline. In 1922, the large, rectangular two-story addition to the west was constructed. The church’s interior is largely unaltered and features a beaded-board vaulted ceiling and curved oak pews. The first Presbyterian congregation organized in the De-Queen area in the late 1890s. Promotional material in church papers called for Presbyterian families to settle in the area, and the drive apparently was successful, for construction of the church began in the summer of 1898. In 1906 the congregation saw a surge of about eighty-five members when a group of Cumberland Presbyterians (the Presbyterian Church had split in the early nineteenth century) decided to abandon their local church and join this church, a congregation of the Presbyterian Church of the United States. The congregation has always been involved in the growth and development of DeQueen, beginning with the organization of the town’s first kindergarten.