White Rock Chapel
Addison, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Formed in the Freedman's community of Upper White Rock (settled by former slaves from the nearby Coit, Caruth and Obier plantations), White Rock Chapel Methodist Church was organized after a meeting at the home of George Coit. Founding members purchased land on White Rock Creek beside a small African American burial ground in early 1884 and constructed a log building. The first pastor, the Rev. Mr. Burse, served about 28 families until 1914. Frequent flooding was a problem for the congregation. According to oral history, the congregation sometimes spent days inside the building waiting for floodwaters to recede. A 1918 deluge drowned a family after a service; soon after, the congregation moved to this site on higher ground only a few hundred feet to the west. It was donated by S. S. Noell, an Anglo who was a frequent visitor to White Rock Chapel. The congregation was renamed Christian Chapel, C. M. E., in honor of its pastor, C. C. Christian. In 1960, a church member donated more land about a mile south. Most of the original congregation decided to relocate. After enduring the loss of their building from fire, remaining members reclaimed their original name, calling themselves White Rock Chapel Independent Methodist Church. In the fall of 1969, a large corporation claimed ownership of the three acres known as the White Rock Union Graveyard. Area churches banded together to fight the claim in court, securing a temporary restraining order. White Rock Chapel trustees continued the legal battle to preserve the land on which their church first met, finally prevailing in 1979. By the end of the 20th century, the church served a wide area of Dallas County, including residents of the cities of Dallas, Grand Prairie, Garland and Carrollton. (2000)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
After emancipation, freed people from the Coit, Caruth, and Obier plantations built the community of Upper White Rock, and in 1884 they organized a Methodist congregation and raised a log church beside a small African American burial ground. Repeated flooding tormented the worshippers — oral history recalls the congregation trapped inside for days waiting for waters to fall, and a 1918 flood that drowned a family after services drove them to higher ground. Renamed over the decades and tested by fire, the church later fought a years-long court battle, finally won in 1979, to keep the very graveyard where it began.
Why it matters
The chapel is a living record of how a Freedman's community claimed sacred ground of its own and defended it across a century of floods, fires, and legal challenges to its land.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This chapel was born in the aftermath of emancipation, in the era of Reconstruction and the decades that followed. Across the South, people freed from slavery faced an urgent question: how to build free lives, communities, and institutions of their own on land that had so recently been the site of their bondage. One of the very first things freedpeople did, again and again, was found churches — the earliest fully independent Black institutions in American life.
Here that took the form of Upper White Rock, a Freedman's community settled by former slaves from the nearby Coit, Caruth, and Obier plantations. The names of those plantations, carried into the name of a free community, show how directly this new world grew out of the old one.
The land itself shaped the story. The congregation built along White Rock Creek, low ground prone to flooding — a reminder that freedpeople often had to make do with the least secure land available. What they did with it, across more than a century, is the heart of this marker.
People & events
The church was organized after a meeting at the home of George Coit, and in early 1884 its founding members purchased land on White Rock Creek beside a small African American burial ground, where they raised a log building. Their first pastor, the Reverend Mr. Burse, served about 28 families until 1914. Buying land and building a church within two decades of emancipation was an act of enormous determination.
Flooding shadowed the congregation from the start. Oral history recalls worshippers sometimes trapped inside the building for days, waiting for the waters to fall. Then came tragedy: a 1918 deluge drowned a family after a service. Soon after, the congregation moved a few hundred feet west to higher ground, on land donated by S. S. Noell, a white man who was a frequent visitor to the chapel. The church was renamed Christian Chapel, C. M. E., honoring its pastor, C. C. Christian.
The congregation kept changing and enduring. In 1960 a member donated land about a mile south, and most of the original congregation relocated; those who stayed, after losing their building to fire, reclaimed the original name of White Rock Chapel. Then, in the fall of 1969, a large corporation claimed ownership of the three acres of the White Rock Union Graveyard. Area churches banded together and won a temporary restraining order, and the chapel's trustees pressed the legal fight to hold the very ground where their church began — finally prevailing in 1979.
Its place in the American story
This is an American story of a people building institutions from nothing and then refusing to let them go. The founding of independent Black churches after emancipation was one of the most important developments in the nation's history — these congregations became centers of worship, education, mutual aid, and, in time, civil rights. White Rock Chapel is one thread in that vast national fabric.
The burial ground at the heart of the story carries its own weight. For communities whose history was so often erased, a cemetery is a rare, tangible record of who lived, loved, and died there. The decades-long fight to keep it, won in 1979, echoes struggles across the country to protect African American burial grounds from being lost, built over, or forgotten.
There is also the recurring American theme of continuity through hardship. Floods, a drowning, fire, relocation, and a corporate land claim — and still the congregation persisted, at century's end serving a wide swath of Dallas County. That endurance is what turns a small country chapel into a landmark of national meaning.
If you visit
Come to this place ready to listen more than to look. The power here is in the story the ground holds — a community that claimed sacred land of its own and defended it across generations of floods, fire, and legal challenge. Stand quietly and let that history settle over you.
Think about the small distances that shaped everything: the move of only a few hundred feet to higher ground after the 1918 flood, and the burial ground the congregation fought for years to keep. In this landscape, a slight rise in elevation and a few acres of earth carried enormous human meaning.
If you're tracing African American history around Dallas County, this is a moving and grounding stop. Treat any burial ground you encounter with the respect it deserves, and carry away the marker's real lesson: that a free community, once it claimed its own sacred ground, held onto it against everything the years could throw at it.
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
- · George Coit
- · S. S. Noell
- · C. C. Christian
Themes & tags
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