Cedar Branch Community and Church
Houston County, Houston County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Cedar Branch began in the 1860s as a settlement of freedmen. John Smith (1809-1890) and Anna Jane Pouncy Smith (1811-1874) deeded a parcel of their cotton plantation to each of their former slaves. The freedmen organized a church in 1862 and built a sanctuary in 1864. Levi Leonard chose the name Cedar Branch for the community. He and Alonzo Campbell selected a cemetery site. By 1888 a school was established, and classes were held in the church building. In 1952 it became part of the Grapeland School District. The church continues to serve as the focus of this community.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Cedar Branch grew from an extraordinary act at the close of slavery: a planter couple deeded parcels of their own cotton plantation to each of their former slaves, who built a community on the land. The freedmen organized a church in 1862 and raised a sanctuary in 1864, and by 1888 a school met in the church building—the church remaining the community's heart to this day.
Why it matters
Freedmen's settlements like Cedar Branch, anchored by their own church and school, were the seedbeds of Black self-determination in the post-emancipation South.
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Related people
- · John Smith
- · Anna Jane Pouncy Smith
- · Levi Leonard
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Cedar Branch Community School
Grapeland, TX
Schooling at Cedar Branch dates to at least 1888, and in 1895 the local church donated its old sanctuary to serve as a schoolhouse. By 1911 the settlement was its own common-school district, and a two-room school later rose on this site with help from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, the philanthropy famous for financing schools for African-American children across the rural South. The school anchored the community until it consolidated with Grapeland in 1952.
St. Paul Shiloh High School
Oakwood, TX
After emancipation, freedmen settled the right bank of the Trinity River and, believing deeply in education, each community started a school of its own. The St. Paul school was organized in 1875, meeting first in the Bannamon quarters and then an AME church before the community bought land for a one-room log "colored school" in 1894. In 1934–35 three of these schools merged into St. Paul Shiloh High School under Ruby Nichols, the area's first African American superintendent; often short on facilities and supplies, its teachers persevered — even winning a state basketball crown in 1945 — and sent graduates into medicine, engineering, teaching, and more before consolidation closed it in 1971.
Lula Demby Dailey
Crockett, TX
Born in the Wheeler Springs community in 1878, Lula Demby earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Prairie View College and came home to teach, becoming principal of the two-room, eight-grade Wheeler Springs School. She worked tirelessly to widen her students' opportunities and, beyond the classroom, helped her community build a canning kitchen, a garden, and a school cafeteria. She lived to ninety-eight and was buried in the family cemetery.
Wheeler Springs Community
Crockett, TX
Settlement here began in 1835 when Joshua J. Hall founded a community along the Trinity River. After the Civil War, formerly enslaved people from the Hall family and other freed African Americans put down roots in this area, building a community around springs on land donated by French Taylor. A Baptist church and schoolhouse rose near the springs in 1905, followed by a new school and a cannery in the 1920s; though the school closed in 1959, the church and civic life endured.