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.
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Related people
- · Jim Green
- · Minnie Shelton
Themes & tags
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