Stephen Alexander McBride
Burkeville vicinity, Newton County, Texas
Marker Inscription
As a co-founder of the Shankleville community, Stephen McBride worked to improve the lives of fellow African Americans. Stephen was born a slave in Texas in 1834. After emancipation, he and Jim Shankle bought land in northern Newton County, forming the nucleus of a community of homes, churches and businesses. McBride owned a cotton gin, store, blacksmith shop, and syrup, saw and grist mills in Shankleville. His most enduring contribution was McBride College (1883-1909), the gift of a man who could not read or write but valued education for young people. The two-story school building also served as a community center and site of religious revivals. Stephen McBride died in 1920. (2008)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Born into slavery in Texas in 1834, Stephen McBride helped found Shankleville after emancipation, buying land in northern Newton County with Jim Shankle to build a self-sustaining African-American community of homes, churches, and businesses. McBride himself ran a cotton gin, store, blacksmith shop, and several mills. His most lasting gift was McBride College, opened in 1883 by a man who could neither read nor write yet prized education above all for the young.
Why it matters
Shankleville and McBride College stand among the freedom colonies where formerly enslaved Texans built land-owning communities and schools, staking a claim to the full promise of emancipation.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Stephen McBride's life spanned the hardest hinge in American history. He was born enslaved in Texas in 1834, came into a manhood defined by bondage, and then lived to see emancipation transform his world. The years after the Civil War — Reconstruction and the Gilded Age that followed — were a moment of enormous possibility and enormous danger for African Americans in the South, and in that moment McBride chose to build.
In northern Newton County, in the far southeastern woods of Texas, freed people faced a basic question: where would they live and work now that they were free? For many, the answer was to acquire land of their own and gather into communities where Black families could own property, worship, trade, and govern their own daily lives. These settlements, often called freedom colonies, sprang up across Texas in the decades after 1865.
Shankleville was one of them. Founded by formerly enslaved people on land they bought and held themselves, it represented a deliberate act of independence at a time when that independence was far from guaranteed. Everything McBride did — the mills, the store, the school — grew out of that founding decision to own the ground and shape the life lived on it.
People & events
Stephen McBride helped found Shankleville alongside Jim Shankle, and after emancipation the two men bought land in northern Newton County that became the heart of the community. What began as a claim to land grew into a genuine town of homes, churches, and businesses — the infrastructure of a self-sustaining place.
McBride himself became its engine. He owned a cotton gin, a store, a blacksmith shop, and syrup, saw, and grist mills. Taken together, that is nearly everything a rural nineteenth-century community needed to process its crops, build its buildings, sweeten its tables, and shop close to home. A man born with nothing he could legally call his own ended his life as a builder of an entire local economy.
But the achievement he is most remembered for was McBride College, which he established in 1883 and which served until 1909. The detail that gives the story its power is this: McBride could not read or write himself, yet he prized education for the young above all else. The two-story school building doubled as a community center and a site for religious revivals, tying learning, worship, and community life together under one roof. McBride died in 1920, having outlived the school he founded but not the community he helped create.
Its place in the American story
McBride's story belongs to one of the most inspiring and least-told chapters of American life: the freedom colonies built by formerly enslaved people after the Civil War. Across Texas and the South, families who had been held as property pooled their earnings, bought land, and founded communities where they could own, worship, learn, and lead. Shankleville stands as a vivid example of that movement.
The founding of a college in 1883 by a man who himself could not read speaks to a truth at the center of the African American experience after slavery. Enslavement had made literacy a crime; freedom made it a mission. Communities that had been denied schooling poured their scarce resources into building it for their children, understanding education as the surest foundation for lasting freedom.
That McBride built mills and stores and a school all at once shows what emancipation meant on the ground. Freedom was not just the absence of bondage; it was the chance to construct a whole world — economic, spiritual, and intellectual — on land you finally owned. Places like Shankleville are where the promise of emancipation was tested and, for a time, fulfilled.
If you visit
Shankleville is a living community in the piney woods of northern Newton County rather than a preserved museum site, so what you are visiting is a place, not an exhibit. Come to understand the landscape where a freedom colony took root: quiet rural roads, deep woods, and the kind of ground that a group of formerly enslaved families chose to make their own.
As you stand here, let the scale of what McBride assembled sink in — a gin, a store, a blacksmith shop, multiple mills, and a two-story school, all serving one community. Try to picture that school building as it once worked, humming as a classroom on weekdays and a gathering place and revival site on other days, the center of gravity for the whole settlement.
This is a marker best appreciated slowly and thoughtfully, ideally as part of a wider journey through East Texas's Black history and its freedom colonies. Read the marker, take in the setting, and carry away the image of a man who could not read building a college so that others could — one of the truly great small monuments to what emancipation made possible.
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
- · Stephen Alexander McBride
- · Jim Shankle
Related events
- · Founding of McBride College (1883)
Themes & tags
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Shankleville Community
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