Peyton Colony (Board House)
Blanco, Blanco County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1865, a group of freed persons, led by Peyton Roberts, established a community they named Peyton Colony. Roberts was born into slavery in Virginia. In the 1820s, he came to Texas with his owner, Jeremiah Roberts, settling in the Bastrop and Caldwell counties area. Peyton and his family eventually became the slaves of Jeremiah Roberts’ grandson, William, who freed his slaves during the Civil War. The freed families agreed to work for William during the war, receiving payment in the form of supplies they would need to begin new lives. In 1865, the former slaves moved to this area, establishing Peyton Colony, which was known as Freedman’s Colony to white settlers. The residents mostly farmed; they also built a lime kiln to make mortar for buildings in the county. The community received a Post Office named Payton in 1898. It was discontinued in 1909, but reestablished in 1918 with the name Board House, named for Alfred V. Walker’s lumber home, which housed the Post Office. Life in the community largely revolved around Mt. Horeb Baptist Church, which organized in 1874 under the Rev. Jack Burch. Members built a log cabin which served as a church and community school on land donated by Jim Upshaw (Upshear). Residents used a cemetery on land deeded by Peyton Roberts; many of the settlement’s early pioneers were buried there. Although the community declined throughout the 20th century, many descendants continued to live here and remnants remained. Today, Peyton Colony is remembered as the realization of the dreams of ex-slaves to establish a community as freed persons. (2008)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1865 a group of newly freed people led by Peyton Roberts—born into slavery in Virginia and brought to Texas in the 1820s—founded a community of their own here, known to white settlers as Freedman's Colony. The families farmed and built a lime kiln, and life centered on Mt. Horeb Baptist Church, organized in 1874, whose log cabin doubled as a school. A post office, a cemetery on land deeded by Roberts, and generations of descendants sustained the settlement well into the 20th century.
Why it matters
Peyton Colony stands as a tangible realization of emancipation—formerly enslaved Texans building a self-governing community of their own in the first months of freedom.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The spring of 1865 was one of the great hinge moments in American history. The Civil War was ending, and with it the institution of slavery that had shaped the South for generations. In Texas, word of freedom came late—the enslaved population there did not learn their liberty was secured until the summer of 1865—so the earliest free communities in the Hill Country were built in a landscape still figuring out what freedom would look like in practice.
Blanco County sits in the rolling limestone country west of Austin, a region of thin soil, cedar brakes, and hard-won farms. It was frontier land, sparsely settled, where survival meant raising your own food, building your own shelter, and leaning on your neighbors. For a group of newly freed families arriving with little more than the supplies they had bargained for, this was demanding ground.
What set this moment apart was choice. For the first time, these families could decide for themselves where to live, what to plant, and how to govern their own affairs. Across the postwar South, freed people were making exactly this decision—and many concluded that the surest path to dignity was a community entirely their own.
People & events
At the center of the story is Peyton Roberts, a man whose life traced the whole arc of American slavery and emancipation. Born into bondage in Virginia, he was brought to Texas in the 1820s and, through the workings of inheritance, eventually belonged to a younger generation of the same family. When his enslaver freed his people during the war, the freed families struck a practical bargain: they would keep working through the war years in exchange for the supplies they would need to start over.
With those supplies in hand, Roberts led a group of families to this stretch of Blanco County in 1865 and founded the settlement that bore his name. To white neighbors it was known simply as the Freedman's Colony, but to the people who built it, it was Peyton Colony—a place with their own name on it. They farmed the land and, resourcefully, built a lime kiln to burn local limestone into mortar, a product useful enough to bind them into the wider county economy.
In 1874 the community's spiritual and civic heart took shape when the Rev. Jack Burch organized Mt. Horeb Baptist Church. On land donated by Jim Upshaw, members raised a log cabin that served as both church and school—two of the things freed people wanted most. Roberts himself deeded land for a cemetery, and there the settlement's founders were laid to rest among the people they had led to freedom.
Its place in the American story
Peyton Colony belongs to one of the most important and least-told chapters of American history: the freedom colonies that formerly enslaved people built across the South after emancipation. Denied land, capital, and safety in the wider world, thousands of freed families pooled what little they had to establish self-governing settlements—complete with churches, schools, and burial grounds—where they could live on their own terms.
These communities were acts of nation-building in miniature. A church that doubled as a school meant that literacy and worship, both long denied under slavery, could finally be pursued openly. A cemetery on deeded land meant permanence—proof that a people meant to stay. In every one of these choices, freed Americans were answering the central question of Reconstruction: what would freedom actually mean?
The answer here was quiet and durable. Peyton Colony was not a headline event; it was something steadier and, in its way, more remarkable—ordinary families turning the abstract promise of emancipation into fields, buildings, and generations of descendants who called this place home well into the 20th century.
If you visit
Come to this corner of the Hill Country expecting subtlety rather than spectacle. Places like Peyton Colony reveal themselves slowly, in the land itself and in the traces of long habitation—old homesteads, a church community, and the cemetery where the settlement's founders rest.
That cemetery is the heart of a visit. Walk it slowly and read the names; the ground Peyton Roberts deeded holds the pioneers who followed him out of slavery and into a community of their own making. A burial ground like this is a primary source you can stand inside, more eloquent than any textbook about who lived, endured, and belonged here.
Set it in a wider drive through Blanco County and let the isolation register. Then imagine arriving in 1865 with a wagon of supplies and the astonishing new freedom to decide your own future. Peyton Colony is where that decision was made—and the reason it is remembered is that, for a group of newly free Texans, the dream of a community of their own came true.
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
- · Peyton Roberts
- · Rev. Jack Burch
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
San Marcos Cemetery
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Mt. Horeb Baptist Church
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Peyton Roberts was born into slavery in Virginia and gained his freedom in Texas as the Civil War ended, then moved west to farm this land in the Hill Country. The Black settlement that grew around him became known as Peyton Colony, and in 1874 its residents, led by the Rev. Jack Burch, founded Mt. Horeb Baptist Church. Their first sanctuary was a log building that doubled as a schoolhouse, a common pairing in freedmen's communities where faith and literacy advanced together.
Peyton Colony Lime Kiln
Blanco, TX
In the years after emancipation, freedpeople across Texas built their own settlements from the ground up, and Peyton Colony was one of them—founded in the 1860s by formerly enslaved Peyton Roberts and his neighbors in the Blanco County hills. Alongside their homes, a school, and Mt. Horeb Baptist Church, the community fired this lime kiln to make mortar strong enough to raise buildings that still stand today. The kiln's later restoration turned a working piece of frontier industry into a monument to self-reliance.