Pelham Community
Frost, Navarro County, Texas
Marker Inscription
First called Forks of the Creek, this town was settled by Black families after 1866. Wesley United Methodist Church, which housed the first school, was organized in 1878 and moved near the present cemetery in 1890. Brown's Chapel A. M. E. Church was formed in 1905 and Union Baptist in 1916. Granted a post office in 1898, the town was renamed Pelham by postmaster Lewis Richie's wife for her home in Alabama. Population peaked at 350 in 1926. The post office, schools, stores, cotton gin, and telephone company that served the village are now gone, but the community heritage remains strong. (1975)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Founded by Black families after 1866 and first called Forks of the Creek, Pelham was one of the freedmen's communities that took root in Texas after emancipation. Its residents organized churches — Wesley Methodist, Brown's Chapel A.M.E., and Union Baptist — the first of which also housed the community's school. Renamed Pelham when it won a post office in 1898, the town peaked at 350 people in 1926; though its stores, gin, and schools are gone, its heritage endures.
Why it matters
Pelham is a rare surviving freedmen's community, embodying the determination of formerly enslaved Texans to build independent towns anchored by their own churches and schools during Reconstruction.
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Related people
- · Lewis Richie
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Younger Cemetery
Silver City, TX
North Carolinians Alexander Younger and his wife Jane came to Texas in 1847, first receiving land in the Peters colony before settling to farm in Navarro County. In 1854 they set aside part of the farm to bury their son, and the plot grew into a community cemetery of more than 1,600 graves. Around 1860 the adjacent Woodward Cemetery began as a burial ground for enslaved people, and the site — still in use, with an annual May homecoming — holds many of the Purdon area's pioneer settlers and early leaders.
Ash Creek (Pelham) School
Frost, TX
Founded in 1899 in the historically African-American community of Pelham, this school first met in the local Methodist chapel before a two-story schoolhouse rose near the cemetery in 1908. Uncommon for a rural Black school of its era, it taught all twelve grades, sending graduates on to college. In 1921 its trustees drew on the Chicago-based Rosenwald Foundation—Julius Rosenwald's landmark partnership with Southern Black communities—to build a larger school, which served until consolidation in the 1960s.
Wesley Chapel Methodist Church
Frost, TX
Organized in 1877 at the forks of Richland and Ash creeks by an itinerant Methodist preacher, this congregation first gathered in a log schoolhouse before building its own sanctuaries, rebuilt in 1911 and again in 1934. It became a cornerstone of the rural, historically African-American Pelham community—home to the Sunday school where the area's children learned and the outreach that sustained its members young and old.
Pelham Cemetery
Frost, TX
Pelham Cemetery has served an African American community founded in the years after the Civil War by freedpeople who had recently gained their liberty. Originally called Fork of the Creeks for the three streams that met nearby, the farming settlement buried its earliest known resident, Isaac Franklin, in 1880. Families like the Caruthers, Porters, and Stanfords rest here, and a community association has cared for the grounds since the late 1930s.