Center Point Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

🏛️The era

After emancipation, freedom in Texas arrived late and did not arrive safely. News of the Emancipation Proclamation reached many enslaved Texans only in June 1865, when Union troops landed at Galveston and announced that the enslaved were free. Freedom brought a wave of violence. Across Reconstruction-era Texas, formerly enslaved people faced intimidation, assault, and murder from people determined to keep the old order.

Many freedpeople protected themselves by gathering together. They formed communities, often called freedom colonies, on land that others did not want: thickets, poor soils, creek bottoms, and remote backwoods. Hundreds of these settlements grew up across Texas. Families could farm, worship, and educate their children there with some distance from hostile neighbors.

Center Point, in the thickets of Hunt County near Greenville, was one of these places. At first, people lived in makeshift homes and even in the woods, surviving together. From that shared survival came the institutions that held freedom colonies together, and the church came first.

👥People & events

The inscription names some of the earliest freedmen to settle in the Center Point thickets: Charlie C. Haley, Henry Polk, and Henry H. Brown, along with their families. Before there was any building, Haley led the group in religious meetings. Worship in homes and in the open woods kept the community together through dangerous years.

Around 1870 another leader arrived. Andrew Jackson Hurdle, an ordained minister and elder, moved his growing family to Center Point from a freedom colony near Mount Vernon. By 1879 Hurdle and Haley had organized a formal congregation, Center Point Christian Church, in the middle of the thickets, with Hurdle as its first minister. The church belonged to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a tradition that grew out of the American religious revivals of the early 1800s.

Hurdle's influence went well beyond one congregation. In 1900 he was elected president of the Northeast Texas Christian Missionary Convention, which served Black members of the Christian Church. Its main goal was to build a college. Members from Center Point helped make that happen, and several served on the faculty of the Northeast Texas Christian Theological and Industrial College in Anderson County.

The congregation also took pride in doing things on its own terms. Over the years it built new church buildings without going into debt. For a community that started out living in the woods on land nobody wanted, that record of paying its own way reflected hard-won self-reliance.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Center Point Christian Church shows how the Black church became the backbone of African American life after slavery. In freedom colonies across the South, the church was more than a place of worship. It served as meeting hall, school, social safety net, and training ground for leaders, at a time when most public institutions were closed to Black citizens or openly hostile to them.

Its focus on education follows a pattern seen across the postwar South. Formerly enslaved people had been legally barred from learning to read in many states, and they pursued schooling with great determination. Black churches and religious associations founded schools and colleges and staffed them with their own members. The Center Point congregation's role in a theological and industrial college is part of that effort.

Freedom colonies themselves are an often-overlooked chapter of American history. Many have disappeared, their land lost and their stories unrecorded. A congregation like this one, organized in 1879 and still honored with a marker in 2017, is a living link to the communities freedpeople built for themselves in the years right after emancipation.

🧭If you visit

Center Point is in the Hunt County countryside near Greenville. Driving out, try to picture the landscape the first families saw: thick, tangled woods that offered cover and a place to start over. The thickets are why the community was here at all.

This is a church home to a living congregation. Be respectful, especially during services or events, and treat the grounds as the sacred space they are. Read the marker and think about how a community that began meeting in the woods came to build its own churches, debt-free.

Center Point fits well into a trip focused on African American history in North and Northeast Texas, where many freedom colonies once stood. Pair it with visits to Greenville and nearby towns, and look for other markers telling the stories of freedpeople's churches, schools, and settlements. Together they show how Black Texans built community in the years after slavery.