Minnie (Washington) Yates

🏛️The era

Minnie Washington was born in 1878, barely a dozen years after slavery ended in Texas. Her parents, James and Ella Washington, had been enslaved on the Jones Plantation in Navarro and Gonzales counties. Like thousands of other freed families, they faced the long, hard work of building a free life in a state where the promises of Reconstruction faded quickly and Jim Crow laws took their place.

In that world, land meant everything. Owning your own acres meant you did not have to sharecrop for someone else. You could feed your family, pass something down and have a measure of independence that no one could easily take away. Across Texas, Black families pooled their resources and bought land. Many formed freedmen's settlements, sometimes called freedmen's colonies, in the countryside.

Those communities were built on a few pillars, and two of the strongest were church and school. Public schooling for Black children in the segregated South was badly underfunded, when it existed at all. So communities often built and ran their own. A single building could hold Sunday worship and weekday lessons.

👥People & events

Minnie was one of five children born to James and Ella Washington. She married R.C. Yates, and around the turn of the century the couple moved from Morales in Jackson County to Poth in Wilson County. There they bought roughly 100 acres of land. For the children of formerly enslaved people, that purchase meant a great deal.

Minnie also had something uncommon for a woman of her time and background: a college education. She graduated from Guadalupe College in Seguin, an African American college that opened in 1887. She understood what learning could do for her family. The Yateses raised eleven children, and Minnie wanted them and their neighbors' children to have a real education.

In 1916, Minnie and R.C. moved an old schoolhouse from Dewees onto their own property. That building became home to Mount Moriah Baptist Church and a community school, giving the settlement a place to worship and a place to learn under one roof. Minnie taught there, and she recruited her friend Myrtle Love Brown Everage to teach alongside her. Everage went on to become a school principal and had a long career in education.

R.C. Yates died in 1945. Minnie lived until 1970, long enough to see the end of legal segregation in American schools. The two are remembered as influential settlers of the Poth area who kept building community through education and encouragement.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Yates family story is part of one of the most important and least told chapters of American history: how formerly enslaved people and their children built lives of their own after emancipation. Land ownership was not a small matter. For many Black Southerners, it was the clearest mark of freedom and the most dependable protection against the exploitation of sharecropping and tenant farming.

The Yateses' schoolhouse also reflects a nationwide pattern. Across the segregated South, Black communities did not wait for states to fund their children's education fairly. They built schools themselves, often alongside churches. The teachers they trained and recruited, like Myrtle Everage, carried that commitment into the next generation of classrooms.

Minnie Yates's story is also a women's history story. As a college-educated Black woman who taught her own children and her community, recruited other teachers, and helped turn a relocated building into a church and school, she represents the many women whose work held communities together but rarely made the history books.

🧭If you visit

Poth is a small town in the brush and farm country of Wilson County, southeast of San Antonio. Standing at this marker, think about the scale of what the Yates family did: about 100 acres bought by the children of formerly enslaved people, and a schoolhouse hauled across the countryside to serve as church and classroom.

This is a quiet, reflective stop, and a good one for families. It opens up conversations about what freedom meant in practical terms, why owning land mattered so much, and how communities built their own schools when no one else would. Take a moment to consider how far a single teacher's determination can reach.

The stop fits naturally on a drive through the small towns of the region between San Antonio and the Gulf Coast plains. If you are exploring African American history in Texas, pair it with a visit to Seguin, where Minnie Yates went to college, and with other freedmen's-era markers in the area.