Kincheonville
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Thomas Kincheon, a former slave from Mississippi, established the rural community of Kincheonville in this area shortly after emancipation in 1865. Many independent communities were created in Texas by African Americans following the Civil War, usually on undesirable or unprofitable land. Although these places were often poor, the freedmen were able to live their lives and practice their religion without outside interference. Unlike other freedmen’s communities in Texas, tradition holds that Anglos and Hispanics lived alongside African Americans in Kincheonville. Kincheon and his wife, Mary, operated a farm that supplied milk and butter to Austin’s all-Black Tillotson college. Several members of the Kincheon family are buried at the Williamson Creek Cemetery four miles east of this site. Public life in Kincheonville was centered on Zion Rest Baptist Church, established in 1903 as both a congregation and a school. Kincheonville remained a small farming community until 1928, when the city passed a new master plan designed to force African Americans out of their homes. Public utilities like schools and water lines were only open to African Americans in a “Negro District” on the far side of East Avenue (now IH-35). This policy, combined with the economic shocks of the great depression, pushed many residents out of Kincheonville and other historically black neighborhoods. In 1952, Thomas Kincheon II sold the land for suburban development. Although the Kincheon family moved to east Austin in the 1960s, Blumie, Elijah, James Andrew and Minnie Streets still bear their names. Zion Rest continues to serve the area from a sanctuary built in 1965. (2015)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Thomas Kincheon, a former slave from Mississippi, founded this rural community shortly after emancipation in 1865—one of many freedmen's settlements Black Texans built on marginal land where they could live and worship free of outside interference. Kincheonville's life centered on Zion Rest Baptist Church, founded in 1903 as both congregation and school, and tradition holds that Anglos and Hispanics lived here alongside African Americans. Austin's 1928 master plan and the Great Depression drained the community, and its land was sold for suburban development in 1952, though street names still honor the Kincheon family.
Why it matters
Kincheonville records both the hopeful self-reliance of Texas freedmen after slavery and how discriminatory city planning later dismantled the very neighborhoods they created.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When the Civil War ended in 1865, roughly a quarter of a million enslaved people in Texas learned of their freedom — famously later than most of the South, a delay now remembered every June as Juneteenth. Emancipation was a beginning, not a settlement. Freed families needed land, work, schools, and above all a place where they could gather and worship without a white overseer's permission. Across Texas, they answered that need by building communities of their own.
The area around present-day South Austin was, in those years, open farming country on the edge of a growing capital city. Land that Anglo planters considered too poor, too rocky, or too far from market was often what freed people could actually acquire. On exactly that kind of ground, a community could take root — modest, self-governing, and fiercely independent.
This is the world into which Kincheonville was born: one of dozens of freedmen's settlements that dotted the Texas map after the war, each a small experiment in Black self-reliance during the decades of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow order that followed it.
People & events
Thomas Kincheon came to Texas having been enslaved in Mississippi, and shortly after emancipation he established the community that would carry his name. With his wife, Mary, he worked a farm that did more than feed his own family — it supplied milk and butter to Tillotson College, one of Austin's institutions founded to educate Black students. That detail says a great deal: a formerly enslaved farmer was helping sustain the education of a rising generation.
By tradition, Kincheonville was unusual among Texas freedmen's towns because Anglos and Hispanics are said to have lived here alongside African Americans — a small, everyday integration at a time when the surrounding society was hardening in the opposite direction. The heart of community life was Zion Rest Baptist Church, founded in 1903 to serve as both a house of worship and a school, the two roles so often braided together in Black communities of the era.
The turning point came in 1928, when Austin adopted a master plan that steered public services — schools, water lines — toward a designated 'Negro District' on the far side of East Avenue, today's Interstate 35. Combined with the hardships of the Great Depression, this pressure drained the community. In 1952, Thomas Kincheon II sold the land for suburban development, and by the 1960s the family had moved to East Austin.
Its place in the American story
Kincheonville is a local chapter of one of the largest and least-told stories in American history: what freedom actually looked like on the ground after slavery. Across the South, formerly enslaved people built hundreds of independent settlements, church by church and field by field, insisting on the right to govern their own daily lives. These places rarely appear in national textbooks, yet together they represent an extraordinary act of nation-building from below.
The community's decline is just as nationally resonant. Austin's 1928 plan was one instance of a practice that reshaped cities across the country — using zoning, utility maps, and 'planning' language to concentrate and contain Black residents. The quiet machinery of where a water line was laid or a school was built could dismantle a neighborhood as surely as any overt act, and it did so in cities far beyond Texas.
So Kincheonville holds two American truths at once: the hope and ingenuity of people who built something from nothing, and the deliberate policies that later unbuilt it. Remembering both is how we keep the whole story honest.
If you visit
There is no grand monument here — and that is part of what makes the site worth understanding. What survives Kincheonville is woven into the ordinary fabric of South Austin. The strongest living trace is in the street signs: Blumie, Elijah, James Andrew, and Minnie streets still carry the names of the Kincheon family, small markers of a community that once filled these blocks.
Zion Rest Baptist Church, the institution that anchored public life from 1903, continues to serve the area from a sanctuary built in 1965. If you pause at the marker, let yourself picture the farmland that once stretched here, the cows that supplied a Black college's kitchens, and the churchyard that doubled as a schoolroom.
For a fuller reflection, several members of the Kincheon family are buried at Williamson Creek Cemetery, about four miles east of the marker site. Reading a place like this is less about a single building and more about learning to see a whole vanished landscape in the names and roads that remain. Bring patience and imagination; they are the right tools for this stop.
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
- · Thomas Kincheon
- · Mary Kincheon
- · Thomas Kincheon II
Related events
- · Austin's 1928 master plan
Themes & tags
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