The Jamison Building

🏛️The era

Texarkana is a city with a split personality, and it wears it proudly. The state line between Texas and Arkansas runs right through town, and for much of its history the place grew up as a railroad crossroads. Trains brought people, goods, and money, and a busy downtown of brick commercial buildings rose to serve them.

But in the early twentieth century, that downtown was not open to everyone on equal terms. Across the South, Jim Crow laws and customs kept Black and white residents apart in schools, theaters, restaurants, and places of business. Black doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs often found it hard to rent office space in white-owned buildings, even when they had the training, clients, and money to run a professional practice.

The answer, in city after city, was for Black communities to build their own. Separate business districts grew up across the country, each a small world of shops, offices, churches, and meeting halls. The Jamison Building opened in 1930, just as the Great Depression was taking hold. Putting up a new commercial building in those uncertain years took real confidence in the community it was meant to serve.

👥People & events

The man behind the building was Dr. Garling Urih Jamison, Sr., born in Mississippi in 1881. Like many ambitious Southerners of his generation, he built his life somewhere other than his birthplace, and he put down roots in Texarkana. The marker calls him a doctor but does not describe his practice. What it does make clear is that he saw a need in his city and filled it.

In 1930 he opened this structure as Texarkana's first business and professional office building for the Black community. That word "first" carries weight. Before this, Black professionals had no building of this kind to call their own. Afterward, they had an address, a front door, and a shared place where clients and patients knew to find them.

Jamison hired the Texarkana firm of Witt, Seibert, and Halsey to design it, and the result was more than a plain box. The architects used brick decoratively, giving the building a character that set it apart on the street. Over the years it became a center of economic, cultural, and social life for Black Texarkana: a place to do business, but also a place to meet, talk, and belong.

Jamison lived until 1951, long enough to see his building become a fixture of the community. In 1983 the State of Texas named it a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, confirming what local residents had known for half a century.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Jamison Building belongs to a nationwide story that is too often left out of the textbooks. Under segregation, Black Americans built parallel economies of banks, insurance companies, newspapers, barbershops, and professional offices. Places like Tulsa's Greenwood district and Durham's Parrish Street became famous, but hundreds of smaller cities had their own versions, often anchored by one determined builder.

These buildings mattered for more than rent and commerce. They were where people planned church events, organized civic groups, and shared news. Many of the doctors, teachers, and business owners who worked in such buildings later helped lead the push for civil rights. Economic independence gave communities room to act.

Far fewer of these structures survive than once stood. Urban renewal, highway construction, and simple neglect claimed many of them. A standing building like the Jamison is a physical record of what Black communities achieved on their own, under laws built to hold them back.

🧭If you visit

Start by simply looking at the brickwork. The marker singles out the building's decorative use of brick, so take a moment to study the patterns and details that the architects worked into the facade. Those touches were a deliberate choice, a sign that this building was meant to be admired, not just used.

Try to picture the street as it was in the 1930s and 1940s, with patients coming to appointments, clients visiting offices, and neighbors stopping to talk out front. The building was a hub, and a little imagination brings that bustle back.

Texarkana makes a fun stop on any road trip through the region, since you can stand with one foot in Texas and one in Arkansas. Pair the Jamison Building with a walk through the older downtown and a visit to the state line. You'll get a fuller picture of how the city grew, and of who got to take part in that growth.