Green Bay A.M.E. Church
Tucker, Anderson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This congregation traces its history to 1866, when a group of black workers at the Long Lake Cotton Plantation gathered together informally to organize a church. The following year the owners of the plantation designated a plot of land on which the workers built a sanctuary, known as Green Bay Church. In 1868 the congregation was formally recognized by the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) denomination and was renamed Green Bay A.M.E. Church. It was the first church in the Long Lake area. In 1870 members of the church organized a day school for their children which became known as Green Bay School. When the church was moved to this site in 1887, school classes were held in the church building until a new school facility was erected in 1899. The church continued to grow in its new location. Missionary activities included the establishment of two new congregations in the Tucker vicinity: New Salem Church and Bailey Chapel. Construction of a new sanctuary at this site began in 1956 and was completed in 1959. Still an active congregation, Green Bay A.M.E. Church continues to serve the community with worship and outreach. (1989)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This congregation began in 1866, when Black workers at the Long Lake Cotton Plantation gathered informally to organize a church just after Emancipation. The plantation's owners set aside land the following year, and by 1868 the African Methodist Episcopal denomination formally recognized it as Green Bay A.M.E. Church, the first church in the Long Lake area. In 1870 its members founded a day school for their children, and the congregation went on to plant two more churches nearby.
Why it matters
Independent Black churches like this one were among the first institutions freedpeople built for themselves after slavery, becoming the anchors of worship, education, and community for generations.
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Related events
- · Emancipation
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Green Bay High School
Tucker, TX
In 1889, eleven Black men in the Green Bay community formed a board of trustees and organized a school for their children, first meeting in the Green Bay Methodist Church. Later buildings doubled as the Mt. Sinai Masonic Lodge, and generations of teachers served students drawn from a wide rural area until area schools desegregated in 1966. The school was a hard-won center of Black education in the decades after emancipation.
Paul L. Rutledge, Sr.
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Paul L. Rutledge, Sr. (1904–1961) was a Prairie View A&M graduate who also studied at Tuskegee Institute and Atlanta University before devoting his life to education. He led high schools at Neches and Tucker in the 1930s and early 1940s, then became a state supervisor for vocational agriculture. Across these roles he shaped the schooling of generations of African American children in Texas.
Mt. Moriah Baptist Church
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This historically African-American congregation grew from prayer meetings held in the 1870s under a brush arbor on the land of Jimmy and Moriah Nixon, and the church built in the early 1880s took Moriah's name. A tornado destroyed the original building in 1946, but the congregation rebuilt on the same ground. A school beside the church taught grades one through eight, and members helped establish a nearby high school for African-American students in 1938.
Beulah Baptist Church
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