William Stevenson was a frontier minister and a friend of Stephen F. Austin, father of Texas. A circuit rider in the Missouri Conference of the Methodist Church, he made a pastoral trip in 1815 to Pecan Point, home of Claiborne Wright, a member of a newly arrived Anglo-American colony on the Texas side of the Red River. Records indicate that his preaching to Wright and friends in 1815 constituted the first Protestant sermons ever given in Texas, then part of Catholic New Spain. He thus established a beachhead for religious freedom in Texas at this point of entry.