Site of McKnight Plaza
Palestine, Anderson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
James B. McKnight moved to Anderson County in 1848. In 1876 and 1879, he bought land at this site from J.H. Mead. Here, he operated a saddlery and farrier business. McKnight died in 1907, and in 1910, the property was sold to the Farmers and Citizens Bank, which had been established by African American businessmen in 1906. The block here became known as McKnight Plaza. Between 1910 and 1945, McKnight Plaza housed numerous businesses and offices owned by African American merchants, doctors and dentists. The Farmers and Citizens Bank, which would close in the late 1920s, was on a prominent corner of the ground floor. George Macon Shuffer owned a dry good store. Dr. H.V. Hurd, a dentist, and Dr. J.H. Dodd owned a drugstore and soda fountain; Dodd's wife operated a millinery shop. Other businesses included J.B. Blake's cab company, John Tatum's café, H.G. Neely's accounting and insurance office, the funeral home of Al Davis and I.V. Bland, John Hunter's barbershop, and Noah Williams' cleaning and pressing shop. Doctors W.R. Roberts, R.E. Holland and H.D. Patton, as well as dentists Williamson McLellan and H.D. Mitchell, had offices and tended patients at this site. The Missouri Pacific Colored Booster Club, a private social organization located here, sponsored local events and dances. For 35 years, McKnight Plaza served as a commercial center for Palestine's African American community, representing local entrepreneurship and enterprise. Commonly referred to as "on the square," the plaza was once a bustling shopping and office center. Following the building's demolition in 1945, the plaza's former site became a grocery store and later a bank. Today, it remains a significant part of Palestine's social and economic history. (2004)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
After James B. McKnight ran a saddlery and farrier shop on this Palestine block in the late 1800s, the property passed in 1910 to the Farmers and Citizens Bank, founded by African American businessmen in 1906. For the next 35 years the block—known as McKnight Plaza and fondly called "on the square"—thrived as the commercial heart of Palestine's Black community, packed with the offices of doctors, dentists, druggists, cafés, barbers, and a funeral home. Its social life centered on the Missouri Pacific Colored Booster Club, which sponsored dances and events until the building was razed in 1945.
Why it matters
McKnight Plaza is a vivid record of Black entrepreneurship and self-reliance in the Jim Crow South, where a segregated community built its own thriving marketplace of professionals and merchants.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Palestine, Texas, at the turn of the twentieth century, was a railroad town, and that shaped everything about it. But for Black Texans, the decades on either side of 1900 were defined by something else: the hardening of Jim Crow. Segregation laws and customs walled African Americans out of white-owned stores, banks, and professional offices across the South.
The response, in town after town, was to build parallel institutions—a Black Main Street where a Black Main Street was needed because the white one was closed. This block in Palestine, which grew from an old saddlery into a bustling commercial square, is one of those answers.
The timing tells the story. The property's transformation began in 1906 with the founding of a bank by African American businessmen, in the very years when the color line was at its most rigid. What looks like ordinary commerce—a dry goods store, a drugstore, a barbershop—was, in context, an act of self-determination.
People & events
The block takes its name from James B. McKnight, who came to Anderson County in 1848 and bought this land in 1876 and 1879, running a saddlery and farrier business—fitting for a horse-powered age. He died in 1907, and in 1910 the property passed to the Farmers and Citizens Bank, the enterprise African American businessmen had founded in 1906. From that point the block became McKnight Plaza, and for 35 years it thrummed with Black enterprise.
The roll of tenants reads like a self-contained downtown. George Macon Shuffer kept a dry goods store. Dr. H.V. Hurd practiced dentistry; Dr. J.H. Dodd ran a drugstore and soda fountain while his wife operated a millinery shop. There was J.B. Blake's cab company, John Tatum's café, H.G. Neely's accounting and insurance office, the Davis and Bland funeral home, John Hunter's barbershop, and Noah Williams' cleaning and pressing shop. Doctors and dentists—Roberts, Holland, Patton, McLellan, Mitchell—kept offices and tended patients here.
Life on the plaza wasn't only business. The Missouri Pacific Colored Booster Club, a private social organization on the block, sponsored events and dances—the heartbeat of the community's social calendar. Then, in 1945, the building was demolished; a grocery store and later a bank took its place on the ground where the square had stood.
Its place in the American story
McKnight Plaza is a local chapter of one of the most important and least-told stories in American history: the building of Black business districts under Jim Crow. From Durham's Black Wall Street to the Greenwood district in Tulsa to countless smaller squares like this one, African Americans shut out of the white economy created thriving marketplaces of their own.
What makes the Palestine example so vivid is its completeness. A community that could not get a loan, a dental appointment, a hot meal, or a cab ride from white-owned businesses simply built all of those things itself—bank, druggist, doctors, café, funeral home, and social club, all on one block. It is the economics of segregation turned into the architecture of self-reliance.
These districts also remind us how fragile such achievement could be. Demolition, disinvestment, and the later disruptions of mid-century "progress" erased many of them from the landscape, which is exactly why a marker matters: it keeps a place on the map of memory after the building is gone.
If you visit
Here is a place to practice a particular kind of looking—seeing what is no longer there. The plaza building came down in 1945, so you won't find the bustling storefronts; what you'll find is the block itself and a marker that repopulates it for you.
Stand on the corner and read the tenant list slowly. Try to picture the soda fountain fizzing, the millinery window, the cab company's horses or cars waiting, the Booster Club's music spilling out on a dance night. "On the square," people called it, and the phrase carries the warmth of a place everyone knew.
Palestine's historic downtown, with its railroad heritage and old commercial buildings, makes a rewarding stop on an East Texas road trip, and this site adds an essential dimension to it. As you wander, remember that the town's story is not one story but several, and that this block preserves the chapter written by Palestine's African American merchants, professionals, and families.
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
- · James B. McKnight
- · George Macon Shuffer
- · Al Davis
Themes & tags
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