Givens Homesite

🏛️The era

Solomon George Givens and Lula Burleson Givens were both born in Houston County in 1871, only a few years after the end of slavery, to parents who had been enslaved. Houston County is in the piney woods and farm country of east Texas, one of the oldest settled parts of the state, and before the Civil War enslaved labor had been central to its farm economy.

After emancipation, freedpeople across the South wanted above all to own land. Land meant independence: the ability to feed a family, control one's own labor and build a future without answering to a former enslaver. Many never got that chance and ended up in sharecropping or tenant farming arrangements that often kept them in debt. A family that bought its own land was achieving something both hard and deeply meaningful.

The Givenses came of age as Reconstruction ended and the long era of segregation and racial restriction began. In that world, Black rural communities built their own institutions, especially churches and schools, which became the foundations of community life, mutual aid and advancement.

👥People & events

Solomon and Lula were married in Crockett, the county seat, in 1891. The next year, in 1892, the young couple bought 34 acres of land here. That was a remarkable step for two people only about twenty years old, and one generation removed from slavery.

The farm succeeded. By 1893 they had built a large eight-room house on this site, an impressive home that showed how much they had achieved in a short time. A house that size suggests a family that was prospering and a home with room for the gatherings that would later make it a community center.

The Givenses became known well beyond their own household. They were remembered for their charity and as leaders in developing a nearby school and a Baptist church. Their land even played a role in the congregation's spiritual life: baptisms were held in a tank on the property. In Texas, "tank" usually means a stock pond. The scene is easy to imagine: new believers entering the water while the congregation gathered on the bank.

For many years their home was the heart of an African American farming community known as "Givens Hill." A community taking its name from a family says a great deal about the respect and leadership Solomon and Lula earned.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Givens story is part of one of the most important and least celebrated achievements in American history: Black landownership in the generations after slavery. Despite discrimination, limited access to credit and constant economic pressure, many African American families across the South bought land and built independent lives. Each of those farms was hard-won evidence of what freedom could mean.

The church and school the Givenses helped develop reflect a national pattern. After emancipation, African American communities put enormous energy into education and worship, often building and supporting their own institutions with little outside help. Rural Black churches were places of worship and also meeting halls, schools, relief networks and centers of leadership.

Communities like Givens Hill were once found throughout the rural South. Many have since faded as families moved to cities during the twentieth century. Markers like this one help keep alive the memory of places where formerly enslaved people and their children built something lasting of their own.

🧭If you visit

As you stand at this homesite, think about what it took to get here. Two young people, children of formerly enslaved parents, bought land, made it pay and within about a year of their purchase built a home large enough to anchor a whole community. This was once the center of Givens Hill.

Look at the surrounding countryside and picture the community it supported: farm families working their fields, children walking to school, and Sunday gatherings at the Baptist church. Imagine the baptisms at the tank, with the congregation singing at the water's edge.

This site pairs well with a visit to nearby Crockett, where Solomon and Lula were married, and with a broader drive through east Texas's historic farm country. Please treat the area with respect, and remember that rural marker sites may sit next to private land.