Baker Funeral Home
Fort Worth, Tarrant County, Texas
Marker Inscription
After working as a Pullman porter for the Santa Fe Railroad, James Nathan Baker, Sr. decided to open a funeral home in 1917 for Cleburne's African American Community. Licensed as an embalmer in 1922, he operated a funeral home with his mother-in-law, Mattie Gaston Barnes, in their home. In 1926, he and his wife, Ransome Antoinette, moved to Fort Worth and opened a Baker Undertaking Company at this site in a house owned by his father, The Rev. Henry Baker.The Baker Funeral Home continued to grow in the 1930s. After a building expansion, Baker added a community ambulance service in 1932, and his brother opened a third funeral home, in Mineral Wells, in 1935. Together, the three businesses served African Americans throughout the region.In 1938, James Baker founded the Diamond Mutual Burial Association, which helped clients plan for funerals arrangements. During the 1940s, he purchased People's Burial Park. The funeral home was once again remodeled and enlarged.Baker's seven children had always assisted in running the business. He retired in 1967, and after his death in 1970, his son Herbert Victor Baker (d. 1989) became president. Under his leadership, the business continued to grow.Today, Baker Funeral Home is owned and operated by the third and fourth generations of family members who continue to uphold James Baker's commitment to service. A community landmark, the funeral home is a cultural resource, with connections to Fort Worth's historic African American community and its residents, leaders, churches and cemeteries. (2004)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
After working as a Pullman porter for the Santa Fe Railroad, James Nathan Baker, Sr. opened a funeral home for Cleburne's African American community in 1917 and became a licensed embalmer in 1922. Moving to Fort Worth in 1926, he built the Baker Undertaking Company into a regional enterprise that added a community ambulance service, a burial association, and a cemetery, serving Black families across the area. Passed down through four generations, the business remains a landmark tied to Fort Worth's historic Black churches, leaders, and neighborhoods.
Why it matters
Black-owned funeral homes were pillars of African American communities under segregation, providing dignity in death and stable Black-owned enterprise when few other institutions would.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Baker Funeral Home's roots reach back to 1917, deep in the era of legal segregation across the American South. Under Jim Crow, Black Texans were barred from white-owned businesses, hospitals, hotels, and services, which meant African American communities had to build a parallel world of their own institutions—churches, schools, insurance societies, and funeral homes—to meet needs that the wider society refused to serve.
The founder came to this work by a distinctly American road: he had been a Pullman porter for the Santa Fe Railroad. Pullman porters, almost all of them Black men, were among the most respected and widely traveled workers in African American life. The job was demanding and often demeaning, but it offered steady wages and a national vantage point, and it became a launching pad into the Black middle class and into community leadership.
The decades that followed—the 1920s through the 1940s—were years of growth and migration for Black Texans moving toward cities like Fort Worth. In that climate, an African American entrepreneur who could offer dignity, reliability, and service filled a role far larger than his trade.
People & events
James Nathan Baker, Sr. left the railroad to open a funeral home for Cleburne's African American community in 1917, and by 1922 he was a licensed embalmer. He began close to home—literally—operating alongside his mother-in-law, Mattie Gaston Barnes, in their own residence, the humble beginning of a lasting enterprise.
In 1926 Baker and his wife, Ransome Antoinette, moved to Fort Worth and opened at this site, in a house owned by his father, the Rev. Henry Baker. From there the business grew steadily: a building expansion, a community ambulance service added in 1932, and a third family funeral home opened by his brother in Mineral Wells in 1935, so that together the family served African Americans across the region.
Baker kept building institutions, not just a business. In 1938 he founded the Diamond Mutual Burial Association to help families plan ahead, and in the 1940s he purchased People's Burial Park. His seven children grew up working in the business; after his 1967 retirement and his death in 1970, his son Herbert Victor Baker took the helm and carried it forward until his own passing in 1989. Today the third and fourth generations run it still.
Its place in the American story
The story of Baker Funeral Home is the story of Black-owned enterprise in America under segregation. Funeral homes occupied a singular place in African American life: because white businesses would not serve Black families in death any more than in life, the Black funeral home became one of the most stable, respected, and independent institutions a community could have.
That independence carried weight beyond grief. Black undertakers were financially self-sufficient in a way few others could be, which often made them community leaders, patrons of churches, and quiet supporters of civil rights when taking a public stand could cost a person their livelihood. The burial associations and cemeteries they founded, like the ones Baker built, were acts of collective self-reliance—ways for families with modest means to face the future with dignity.
A business that has passed through four generations of one family is rare in any industry. Here it is also a living thread connecting the present to Fort Worth's historic Black churches, leaders, neighborhoods, and cemeteries—an institution that helped a community bury its dead with honor when the wider world would not.
If you visit
This is a working funeral home and a community landmark, so visit with the quiet respect the place asks for. It is not a museum; it is an institution that has served real families across generations, and that is precisely what makes it worth seeking out.
Stand before the building and consider the layers of history folded into one address: a house that belonged to the founder's father, expanded and remodeled decade after decade as the business grew from a single embalmer into a regional service with its own ambulance, burial association, and cemetery. The continuity is the monument.
Fit it into a wider exploration of Fort Worth's historic African American community—its churches, its leaders' homes, and its cemeteries. The marker deliberately ties this site to all of them, so let it be a starting point for understanding how a neighborhood built and sustained its own institutions across a century.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · James Nathan Baker, Sr.
- · Herbert Victor Baker
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
James E. Guinn School
Fort Worth, TX
When Fort Worth organized its public schools in 1882, Black children were first taught in churches before the city built segregated schoolhouses. James Elvis Guinn, the son of formerly enslaved parents who prized the education they never had, rose to become a chemistry professor at Prairie View before returning home to lead the South Side Colored School. The grand three-story brick school begun in 1917 was named in his honor days after his death, and it grew into the largest Black school in the city.
Mt. Zion Baptist Church
Fort Worth, TX
On Christmas Day 1894, evangelist the Rev. Frank Tribune gathered five founding members—four of them women—to organize Mt. Zion Baptist Church, aided by the prominent Black Baptist leader the Rev. Dr. A. R. Griggs. The congregation worshipped in a 1907 frame building, then a tabernacle, before raising this brick sanctuary beginning in 1919 and adding an education building in the mid-20th century.
Terrell Heights
Fort Worth, TX
Platted in the late 1880s and knit together by early streetcar lines, Terrell Heights became one of Fort Worth's premier African American neighborhoods. Banker William Madison "Gooseneck Bill" McDonald bought lots here and financed homes for Black families—doctors, dentists, educators, ministers, and laborers among them. Residents like NAACP leader Dr. George D. Flemmings and businesswoman Lucille Smith made the neighborhood a center of Black civic and professional life through the desegregation era.
Laneri House
Fort Worth, TX
Italian immigrant John B. Laneri settled in Fort Worth in 1883 and rose to become a leading businessman and civic figure, founding the O.B. Macaroni Company and a private boys' school known as Laneri College. In 1904 he built this classically detailed brick home, with fine interior woodwork, in one of the city's most fashionable neighborhoods, living there until his death in 1935.