Bear Creek Community
Irving, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Settlers began arriving in this area, once a part of Robertson’s Colony, in the 1850s. Early families included the Casters, Borahs, Sowers and Haleys. Following the Civil War, freedmen moved to the area, and friends and families once separated by slavery were reconnected. Jim Green, the first African American landowner in what became known as the Bear Creek community, bought his acreage in 1878. Others soon followed: Jim Chivers, Ben and Rose Dilworth, Alex King, Elizabeth Lawson, Collins and Rachel Patton, D.W. Ellison (Ellerson), Sam Sweat, the Trigg family and Minnie Shelton (Sheldon), who later donated land for Shelton’s Bear Creek Cemetery. These families organized the Shady Grove Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in 1884, erecting a one-room church and school building on land donated by Jim Green. The congregation, which built a larger structure in 1897, continued to grow and worship together throughout the 20th century. The Bear Creek community school, known as Freedom School, began as a private education facility. The students later transferred to Grand Prairie’s Dal Worth School, which became County Colored School No. 2. It, along with schools from the Sowers community, were annexed to the Irving Independent School District in 1955. Early teachers in the Bear Creek settlement included Josie Davis and Earlie Mae Wheeler. Approximately 150 years after the first settlers came to the area, the once rural Bear Creek settlement is experiencing rapid growth from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and related highway and airport expansion. Shelton’s Bear Creek Cemetery is one of few links to the settlement and the lives of the families who contributed over the years to the community. (2004)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Settled in the 1850s within the old Robertson's Colony, this stretch of North Texas prairie became something new after the Civil War, when freedmen moved in and reunited families that slavery had torn apart. Jim Green, the first Black landowner here, bought his acreage in 1878, and neighbors soon followed, organizing the Shady Grove Christian Methodist Episcopal Church and a Freedom School on land Green donated. For generations the Bear Creek community farmed, worshipped, and taught its children here, until the sprawl of the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex and its airport all but erased the settlement.
Why it matters
Bear Creek is a vivid example of the freedmen's communities that African Americans built across the postwar South—self-governing towns rooted in church, school, and land ownership that are now often remembered only by their cemeteries.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The prairie that became the Bear Creek community was first settled in the 1850s, when this stretch of North Texas lay within the old Robertson's Colony — one of the land-grant colonies that drew Anglo settlers to the region in the decades before statehood matured. Early families like the Casters, Borahs, Sowers, and Haleys worked the land in a Texas that still ran on slavery, and their labor and their neighbors' set the pattern of farms and fields here.
The Civil War shattered that order, and its ending remade this ground. With emancipation, freedpeople across the South faced the enormous task of building free lives from almost nothing — and one of the first things they sought was land of their own and the reunion of families that slavery had scattered. The marker records exactly that: after the war, freedmen came to this area, and friends and relatives once separated were reconnected.
What took shape over the following decades was a freedmen's community — a self-governing rural settlement anchored by land ownership, a church, and a school. These communities rose all across the postwar South, and Bear Creek is a clear North Texas example of the form.
People & events
The community's cornerstone was Jim Green, the first African American landowner in what became the Bear Creek settlement, who bought his acreage in 1878. Landownership was everything for freedpeople in this era — it meant independence from the plantation economy and a stake that could not easily be taken away — and Green's purchase opened the door for others. Jim Chivers, Ben and Rose Dilworth, Alex King, Elizabeth Lawson, Collins and Rachel Patton, D.W. Ellison, Sam Sweat, the Trigg family, and Minnie Shelton all followed, and Shelton would later donate land for the cemetery that still bears her name.
These neighbors did what freedmen's communities did best: they built institutions. In 1884 they organized the Shady Grove Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, raising a single one-room building — a combined church and school — on land Jim Green donated. The congregation outgrew it and put up a larger structure in 1897, worshipping together across the generations that followed. The church was the community's spine, and Green's gift of land literally gave it a place to stand.
Education ran right alongside faith. The community's school, remembered as the Freedom School, began as a private effort — Black families paying to teach their own children when the wider system would not. Teachers such as Josie Davis and Earlie Mae Wheeler taught here. In time the students transferred to Grand Prairie's Dal Worth School, which became County Colored School No. 2, and in 1955 those schools were annexed into the Irving Independent School District.
Its place in the American story
Bear Creek belongs to one of the most important and least-told chapters of American history: the freedmen's settlements that African Americans founded across the South after emancipation. Denied full citizenship in practice and shut out of white institutions, formerly enslaved people pooled their resources to buy land, build churches, and educate their children — creating communities that were, in a very real sense, exercises in self-government and self-reliance.
The pattern here is the classic one. It starts with land ownership — Jim Green in 1878 — because land was the foundation of freedom. It centers on a church, Shady Grove C.M.E., a denomination itself born among Black Southerners in the years after the war. And it insists on education, with families funding a "Freedom School" when no one else would teach their children. Church, school, and land: those three pillars held the community up.
That the Freedom School's descendants were still segregated into a "County Colored School" and were not folded into the local district until 1955 is its own piece of national history — a reminder of how long the color line persisted in American education, right up to the era of the civil rights movement. Bear Creek compresses the whole long story of Black Southern life from emancipation to integration into one rural community.
If you visit
The best way to encounter Bear Creek today is at Shelton's Bear Creek Cemetery, which the marker names as one of the few remaining links to the settlement. The community's farms and its early churches have largely given way to the highways, development, and airport expansion of the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, but the cemetery endures — a place to stand where the community's founders and their descendants rest.
Read the surnames on the stones and you are meeting the people the marker names: the families who bought land, built a church, and taught their children against long odds. Go respectfully, as you would to any active resting place, and give yourself a few quiet minutes to take in how much history this modest ground holds.
Set the visit against the metroplex rising all around it, and the contrast becomes the lesson. Roughly a century and a half after the first settlers arrived and freedpeople began building lives here, the fields are gone but the memory is defended. Coming here is a way of honoring a community that, like so many freedmen's settlements, is now remembered chiefly through the cemetery its people left behind.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Jim Green
- · Minnie Shelton
Themes & tags
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