Globe Hill Community and Baptist Church
Giddings, Lee County, Texas
Marker Inscription
George Coleman Truitt, founder of this predominantly African American community, bought land in the area and built at least nine box houses for his tenant farmers. Truitt also ran the community’s only business, a general store. In 1887, Truitt and Simon P. Davis selected a school site on a rocky promontory called Rocky Hill, for which Truitt named the community. He later renamed it Globe Hill. Truitt donated the land for the school and later provided the site for the cemetery. The schoolhouse, completed in November 1887, was also used for church services. The first teacher was Julia Donovan. In the spring of 1889, it was enlarged to accommodate the growing student population. By 1908, students from Jones Colony and the Joseph and Margaret Dockery settlement began transferring to the Globe Hill school and enrollment increased to forty-six students. The school was replaced in the early 1920s with a four-room Rosenwald School which was later annexed and moved to the Post Oak School in 1954. The Globe Hill Baptist Church was formed and organized by the community in 1912. An educator and reverend, Frank Ruffin, became the first pastor of the church. Under his leadership, the congregation grew to more than 96 members, with up to 200 attending at different times. Reverend Ruffin served the church until he passed away in 1939. A women’s mission was established that visited and cared for the needy and sick in the community. In the 1960s, the church was remodeled. Most of the community has left but former residents return each year for the church’s annual celebrations. (2012)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
George Coleman Truitt founded this predominantly African-American community, building homes for tenant farmers and running its only store, then in 1887 donating land atop a rocky rise for a school that doubled as a church. As families from neighboring settlements sent their children, the school grew and was eventually rebuilt as a four-room Rosenwald school. The Globe Hill Baptist Church, organized in 1912 under the Reverend Frank Ruffin, swelled to hundreds and still draws former residents back each year for its annual celebrations.
Why it matters
Globe Hill shows how a Black farming community in the segregated South built its own school, church, and mutual-aid networks—and how those bonds still call its scattered descendants home.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Globe Hill took shape in the decades after the Civil War, in a stretch of Central Texas where cotton was king and most of the work of raising it fell to tenant farmers and sharecroppers. This was the Reconstruction and Gilded Age South giving way to the early modern era — a time of hard rural labor, tight budgets, and, for Black Texans, a society steadily hardening into segregation.
For African American families in that world, land and learning were the two things that could change a life, and both were kept deliberately out of reach. Public schooling for Black children was underfunded where it existed at all, and owning property was a fragile, hard-won thing. Communities that wanted a school or a church usually had to build them with their own hands and their own money.
That is the backdrop against which Globe Hill matters. It was not handed a school by the county or a church by a distant mission board. It made them, on a rocky rise of its own, out of the determination of the people who lived there.
People & events
The community's founder was George Coleman Truitt, and the marker paints him as its central figure in almost every way. He bought land in the area, built at least nine simple box houses for his tenant farmers, and ran the community's only business, a general store. In a place with few institutions, one man's initiative laid the groundwork for a whole settlement.
In 1887, Truitt and Simon P. Davis chose a school site on a rocky promontory called Rocky Hill — which gave the community its first name before Truitt renamed it Globe Hill. He donated the land for the school and later for the cemetery, too. The schoolhouse was finished in November 1887 with Julia Donovan as its first teacher, and it did double duty as a place of worship. Growth came quickly: the building had to be enlarged in the spring of 1889, and by 1908 children from the nearby Jones Colony and the Joseph and Margaret Dockery settlement were transferring in, pushing enrollment to forty-six. In the early 1920s the school was replaced by a four-room Rosenwald School.
The congregation formalized in 1912 as the Globe Hill Baptist Church, with the educator and minister Frank Ruffin as its first pastor. Under Ruffin the church grew to more than 96 members, with as many as 200 attending at times, and a women's mission cared for the sick and the needy. Ruffin served until his death in 1939 — more than a quarter century of leadership that helped bind the community together.
Its place in the American story
Globe Hill is a compact case study in how Black communities built their own institutions in a country that would not build institutions for them. The pattern here — buy land, raise a schoolhouse, let it serve as a church until a congregation can stand on its own, set aside ground for a cemetery — repeated across the post-emancipation South wherever families had the means and the resolve.
The four-room Rosenwald School is a telling detail. In the early twentieth century, thousands of these schools rose across the South through a partnership that required local Black communities to raise part of the cost themselves. Globe Hill's Rosenwald School places this small Texas settlement inside one of the most important chapters in the history of African American education.
And there is the quieter significance of endurance. The community has largely scattered, its school long since absorbed elsewhere, yet former residents still return each year for the church's annual celebrations. That homecoming is its own kind of national story — the way American communities, even after their economic reason for being fades, live on as bonds of memory and belonging.
If you visit
Globe Hill is best approached as a place to slow down and read carefully. The inscription itself is unusually rich — full of names, dates, and the small specifics of how a community was made — so give it time and let those details do their work.
Notice the landscape: a rocky rise that first gave the community its name. Picture a one-room schoolhouse crowning it in 1887, doubling as a church on Sundays, then filling up so fast it had to be enlarged within two years. The cemetery nearby is where you feel the continuity most; it is the kind of ground where generations of a single community rest together.
This marker fits naturally into a thoughtful drive through the freedom colonies and Black farming communities of Central Texas, several of which lie in the same county. If you can, plan around one of the church's annual gatherings — from a respectful distance — because that homecoming is the living continuation of everything the stone describes.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · George Coleman Truitt
- · Simon P. Davis
- · Frank Ruffin
Themes & tags
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