East Springfield Baptist Church
Glenwood, Upshur County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Following the Civil War, many freedmen and their families established communities, including schools, churches and cemeteries. Freedmen settled in this area and established tenant farms, growing cotton. In East Springfield and many freedmen's colonies, the church was a major source of social and cultural development in addition to spiritual needs. Although the congregation formed in the 1800s, the East Springfield Baptist Church was officially formed and received this property in 1923. A church building was soon erected to support the small but growing church. The church was remodeled in the 1980s. Although the membership was small, the devotion to the community and faith equaled those of larger churches, serving the farming community for decades. The church offered Sunday services, Sunday school and church socials, a favorite for many local children and youth. Throughout the 1900s, many of the small churches in the area would gather and worship together, discuss community news and sell food items for charity. These included churches from Snow Hill, Valley View, Shady Grove and more. Located near the church was the East Springfield Colored School. Behind the church is the East Springfield Baptist Church Cemetery, containing the graves of many early settlers and veterans. For over a century, the members of the East Springfield Baptist Church have made a positive impact on the communities of Upshur County with service, faith and love. (2017)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
After the Civil War, freedmen settled this Upshur County area as tenant cotton farmers and built the community institutions — school, church, and cemetery — that sustained them. The East Springfield Baptist congregation formed in the 1800s and received its property in 1923, its small membership matching the devotion of far larger churches. For over a century it offered worship, Sunday school, and socials that bound together neighboring freedmen's settlements.
Why it matters
The church embodies the freedmen's colony experience across East Texas, where emancipated families forged lasting communities of faith and mutual support.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Sherman Chapel Missionary Baptist Church
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Organized in 1870 in the Judson community with help from Reverend Daniel Sherman, this congregation of freedpeople first shared a building with a Methodist congregation until each could build its own sanctuary. Its earliest home stood on Freedmen's Ridge near Omega, a settlement formed by emancipated slaves after the Civil War. Through fire, relocation, and a highway that forced it to rebuild, the church has remained a spiritual anchor for more than a century.
Mattox Cemetery
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Families from Alabama and Georgia settled this area in the 1850s, and oral tradition holds that enslaved people were among the first buried here, with the earliest recorded grave that of Milla Ann Greer Oliver in 1861. Deeded for a church and cemetery by William and Martha Greer in 1887, the "Old Family Cemetery" holds more than four hundred burials, including veterans of every conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam. A cemetery association formed in 1970 to care for the grounds.
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Site of Shiloh School
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Soon after the Civil War, the newly freed African Americans of the Shiloh community built a one-room school for their children, later holding classes in the Shiloh Baptist Church. With help from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, they raised a new two-room schoolhouse in 1920, replaced by a brick building in the 1930s. The school served the community until desegregation closed it in 1966; its graduates went on to contribute across Texas and the nation.