African American History

Texas City, TX

In the years after the Civil War, a group of African Americans — many of them Black cowboys who worked the Chisholm Trail — bought land in central Galveston County to build a community. Their Baptist church, founded in 1885 by the Rev. Israel S. Campbell, an escaped slave known as the "Father of Black Texas Baptists," became the settlement's backbone. It changed names with its pastors over the years and, from an early school begun in 1874, long served as a place of both worship and learning.

Dallas, TX

Rooted in the mid-1800s and rising with Oak Cliff's Tenth Street Historic District, Greater El Bethel Missionary Baptist Church became a spiritual and civic anchor for Dallas freedpeople after Emancipation. Congregants dug the basement by hand and mule team, worshipping there until noted Black architect William Sidney Pittman completed the sanctuary in 1926. Under Rev. William L. Dickson the church ran a day nursery for working mothers and served as a place to counsel calm during years of racial violence.

Del Rio, TX

Organized in the 1920s, Greater Mount Olive is the oldest surviving congregation rooted in Del Rio's African American community. After first worshiping in the local A.M.E. church, members secured their own property on Peirce Street in 1922 under the long leadership of Rev. James Fennell, who guided the church through decades of hardship and growth. The congregation later moved into the former Grace Lutheran Church building in 1974.

Marlin, TX

In 1893 a dozen worshippers in the Missionary Baptist tradition, led by the Rev. N.T. Denson, gathered in a Marlin schoolhouse and named their new congregation Providence to mark what they saw as divine direction. They worshipped under a brush arbor before raising their first sanctuary, only to lose two buildings and their earliest records to fires in 1941 and 1963. Rebuilding after the second blaze, the members renamed the church Greater Providence and kept growing through music, teaching, and community outreach.

Hearne, TX

When Hearne grew up as a rail crossroads on the Texas farmland where enslaved and later freed African Americans lived and labored, its Black community needed a burying ground of its own. Consecrated in 1894 as the New Colored Cemetery — later St. Mark's, then Riverside — it took its first known burial in 1896 and has since received hundreds, among them veterans reaching back to the Spanish-American War and members of the Mosaic Templars of America, a rare Texas chapter of that Black fraternal order. Church congregations and, from 1982, the Greater Riverside Association enlarged and tended the grounds to their present 24 acres.

Fort Worth, TX

Founded in 1895 by the Rev. J. Francis Robinson and members of Mt. Gilead Baptist Church, this congregation first gathered in Fort Worth's YMCA before raising its own home. Worshipers held services in the basement from 1913 until the Gothic Revival sanctuary — red brick trimmed with cast stone and art glass — was finished in 1918. It stands as a monument to a Black community building lasting institutions in the segregation-era South.

Houston, TX

Organized in 1913 and named for A.M.E. Bishop Thomas M. D. Ward, this is the oldest congregation in Houston's Acres Homes community. It began in the home of Rev. John T. Williams, rebuilt after a 1934 fire, and raised its lasting sanctuary in 1955. Under ministers like Rev. Ollie Lewis Dawson—an NAACP activist who made the church a meeting place for civic affairs—it became a hub of community life, its trustees even winning the naming of nearby streets for historically Black colleges.

Houston, TX

Since the late 1800s, the congregation of Greater Zion Missionary Baptist Church has anchored Houston's Greater Third Ward, tracing its roots to a brush-arbor meeting led by the Rev. Gilbert Green. Founded as Little Zion, the church grew alongside a Black community whose members often worked low-paying jobs, and it steadily turned its energy outward. Under the Rev. Moses Leonard Price, its longest-serving pastor (1938–1984), it opened a kindergarten, funded scholarships, and ran summer tutoring. Members have since run food pantries and built affordable homes.

Temple vicinity, TX

The Rev. Early Greathouse, a Georgia-ordained minister who had served in Alabama's government, brought his family to Bell County in 1870, built the area's first cotton gin, and organized its early Baptist churches. Around 1871 he set aside land for this burial ground, which grew from a family plot into a community cemetery. Among those laid to rest here are former slaves who came to Texas with the Greathouse family, a survivor of the Battle of San Jacinto, and veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars.

Tucker, TX

This congregation began in 1866, when Black workers at the Long Lake Cotton Plantation gathered informally to organize a church just after Emancipation. The plantation's owners set aside land the following year, and by 1868 the African Methodist Episcopal denomination formally recognized it as Green Bay A.M.E. Church, the first church in the Long Lake area. In 1870 its members founded a day school for their children, and the congregation went on to plant two more churches nearby.

Tucker, TX

In 1889, eleven Black men in the Green Bay community formed a board of trustees and organized a school for their children, first meeting in the Green Bay Methodist Church. Later buildings doubled as the Mt. Sinai Masonic Lodge, and generations of teachers served students drawn from a wide rural area until area schools desegregated in 1966. The school was a hard-won center of Black education in the decades after emancipation.

Port Lavaca vicinity, TX

The community of Green Lake grew up beside its namesake tidal lake in the late 1840s, given fresh impetus around 1849 when wealthy Kentucky planters arrived with their families and enslaved workers to raise cotton. They built grand homes and a private school, but the Civil War upended everything: after Texas seceded, Federal troops camped nearby awaiting transport ships. With its economy resting on slave labor, Green Lake declined once the war ended and most original settlers had left by 1875.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2007

Built in 1956 amid the woods of Pennypack Park, Greenbelt Knoll was the first racially integrated housing development in Philadelphia — and a model for the nation at a time when housing discrimination was the norm. Developer Morris Milgram, a committed civil rights advocate, gathered noted architects, among them Louis Kahn, to design Modernist homes that blended into the natural landscape. Its first residents were themselves a statement, including Milgram, U.S. Rep. Robert N.C. Nix, and the Rev. Leon Sullivan.

Livingston, TX

In 1846 Livingston officials set aside a downtown block as a cemetery for the town's African American residents, first known as Livingston Colored Cemetery. When railroad growth crowded the site in the 1880s and 1890s, community leaders accepted three acres offered by County Judge Arthur B. Green, moved the graves in 1896, and renamed the ground Greenfield in his honor. Though the oldest marked stone dates to 1906, dozens of earlier burials lie here, and military and fraternal markers throughout attest to generations of Black life and service.

Brownwood, TX

Greenleaf Fisk, remembered as the 'Father of Brownwood,' gave the city five acres for a public burial ground in 1868, with the first known burial in 1873. Now the city's main cemetery of more than 22,000 graves, it holds pioneers and notables—from Noah T. Byars, whose shop hosted the signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence, to pulp author Robert E. Howard—alongside veterans of every war, including Buffalo Soldiers.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2009

In 1932, Pittsburgh numbers baron Gus Greenlee built something no Black baseball owner had ever possessed: his own ballpark. From 1932 to 1938, Greenlee Field was the first African American–owned stadium in the Negro Leagues and home to his Pittsburgh Crawfords, the 1935 league champions. Its diamond hosted some of the greatest players in the sport's history — Hall of Famers Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Cool Papa Bell among them.

Greenville, TX

In the heart of the Texas Blackland cotton belt, the Greenville Cotton Compress once ranked as the world's largest inland press, squeezing loose bales into dense, shippable form for export. On September 30, 1912, its crews set a record of 2,073 bales in a ten-hour day—three a minute—hand-trucked and loaded by skilled Black laborers who moved 500-pound bales at a run to the rhythm of work chants. The cotton pressed here was prized by the spinning mills of England.

Greenvine, TX

Public schooling reached the German farming settlement of Greenvine in 1880, where lessons were first taught in German in a Lutheran parsonage. Fifteen years later, a separate school for local Black children opened at Waller Chapel, sharing a wood-frame building with an African Methodist Episcopal congregation. Consolidation in 1949 sent Greenvine's students to Burton, and the old schoolhouse was moved to join them.

Waco, TX

Established by the city of Waco in 1875, Greenwood Cemetery was laid out with equal acreage for the White and Black communities in a segregated era. Church, Masonic, and political leaders rest here among ordinary Wacoans, and in the 1930s Emma Norwood and the People's Cemetery Association took up the care of its Black section. Its most celebrated resident is baritone Jules Bledsoe, the Waco native who originated "Ol' Man River" in the first cast of "Show Boat."

Houston, TX

As word of Emancipation spread through Texas in 1865, freed African Americans built Freedmen's Town near Buffalo Bayou in Houston's Fourth Ward. With help from the Freedmen's Bureau and missionaries, the community founded the Gregory Institute in 1870—the city's first purpose-built school for Black children—which joined the public system in 1876 and gained its first Black principal a year later. Rebuilt in brick in 1926, the Gregory School educated generations until 1980 and now anchors an African American library.

Middletown, KY

When the Louisville and Frankfort Shortline railroad reached eastern Jefferson County in 1848, it seeded a cluster of communities—Anchorage, Berrytown, and Griffytown. Local tradition holds that in 1879 the freedman Dan Griffith bought an early settler's cabin, moved it to Old Harrod's Creek Road, and founded the settlement that still bears his name. The original cabin stood until it burned in 1956.

Bedias, TX

During the Republic of Texas years, settlers gathered here to form the Bethel community, and the burial of a smallpox victim in 1843 began what became Bethel Cemetery. Among those resting here is Sarah Bradley Dodson, remembered as the 'Betsy Ross of Texas,' whose 1835 Lone Star flag flew over Washington-on-the-Brazos at the signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Her husband Archelaus later deeded the ground to a Presbyterian congregation, and in 1904 an adjacent section opened for the area's African American residents.

Groesbeck, TX

Groesbeck was founded in 1871 and opened Groesbeck College months later; by 1881 trustees had bought land for the education of African American children, and in 1886 the county turned the former college property into the town's first free public school. Voters incorporated for school purposes in 1890, creating the Groesbeck Independent School District, which by 1892 ran separate buildings for white and Black students. Over the following decades rural schools consolidated into the district, integration was completed by 1969, and traditions from the Goat mascot to the ex-students association took root.

Matagorda County, TX

Organized in 1884 near a former plantation site, Grove Hill Baptist Church grew from the faith of the surrounding African American community, and its original building also served as a school. A new structure rose on this site in 1919, and over the decades the congregation added a Sunday school, music and youth programs, and improvements to the building. For well over a century it has remained a center of community life.

Marshall, TX

Henry Bertram Pemberton, born in 1867, became the first college graduate of Wiley College in Marshall and devoted his life to Black education in a segregated Texas. Named principal of the Colored School in 1894 and given permission but no money for a new building, he borrowed on his own credit to raise a two-story schoolhouse that his community repaid. Over decades he expanded Marshall's Black schools, recruited qualified teachers, and helped charter the local NAACP; in 1940 thousands of petitioners had the high school he founded renamed in his honor.

Fort Worth, TX

Born into slavery in Kentucky in 1842 and emancipated in 1865, Hagar Tucker became Fort Worth's first African American policeman when he was appointed a "special policeman" in 1873. He was among the first Black residents of the county to register to vote, yet the era's limits were stark: paid separately from white officers, he could patrol only Black neighborhoods and served only a short time. He later worked other jobs and lived with his wife Amy and their three daughters.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2023

Founded in the 1950s by Dawud Hakim, this Philadelphia shop was the city's first Black-owned bookstore devoted to Black history and authors—a place where readers could find their own story on the shelves. Through the 1960s it became a gathering point for civil rights organizing and Black activism. That prominence also drew the eye of the FBI, which surveilled Hakim's along with other Black bookstores of the era.

San Augustine, TX

Haley Blount Bush, born into slavery in Shelby County in the 1860s, donated land in 1889 from her husband's grant to create this cemetery on the San Augustine county line. Among its 300-plus marked graves is Isom Biggers, a well-known African American Civil War veteran whose service was vouched for by neighbors also thought to rest here. The burial ground holds many people born into slavery and veterans of every war from the Civil War through Vietnam, cared for today by a cemetery association.

Crockett, TX

Joshua James Hall gave a corner of his Houston County land as a burying ground before the Civil War, and after emancipation the freedmen French Taylor, Bob Denby, and Alf Warfield asked his leave to lay their own dead there too. Hall agreed, and the cemetery became a rare shared resting place for both Anglo and African American settlers, its earliest marked grave dating to 1876. A 1997 survey found dozens of marked graves and more than a hundred unmarked ones, still tended by descendants.

Dallas, TX

For the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas, architect George Dahl remade Fair Park into a modern fairground, and among its roughly 50 buildings one was devoted to Black achievement: the Hall of Negro Life. Funded through the tireless lobbying of leaders like Antonio Maceo Smith and managed by Jesse O. Thomas of the National Urban League, its 14,000 square feet held nearly 400 exhibits on education, arts, health, agriculture, and business, drawing 400,000 visitors. When the fair ended, it was one of only two buildings torn down.

Hallettsville, TX

Schooling in Hallettsville reaches back to the Alma Male and Female Institute of 1852, built on land donated by town founder Margaret Hallett, with the Masonic lodge later lending space for church and school alike. A public graded school took shape in 1877, and by 1907 voters made the district independent of the county system. Through fire, rebuilding, and expansion the schools endured, and in 1966 they were integrated, with the former Stevens-Mayo School for Black students becoming a junior high.

Dallas, TX

Ten miles north of downtown Dallas, Hamilton Park grew from the White Rock Farming Settlement into the city's first African American suburban development. It answered a housing crisis created by racial violence in South Dallas and the displacement of Black residents for Love Field, with land bought in 1953 through a Hoblitzelle Foundation loan arranged by an interracial civic association. Named for Dr. Richard Theodore Hamilton, the planned community opened in 1954 around a central school and, by 1961, held 741 homes served by churches, a shopping center, and a park.

Hamlin, TX

Hamlin sprang up in 1902 when settler R.D. Moore sold land to a Kansas City development company for a townsite on the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway, which arrived in 1906. Named likely for railroad executive W.H. Hamlin, the town boomed past a thousand residents by 1908, powered by cotton, rail shipping, and a busy roster of gins, mills, and factories. Oil discovered in 1928 broadened its economy, and the town supported both white and African American schools before integrating in 1965.

Atlanta, GA

In April 1968, after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, his body was brought home to Atlanta, the city of his birth and his ministry. This marker recalls Hanley's Bell Street Funeral Home, where—amid a grieving nation—his family and community tended to him before his funeral. Tens of thousands would fill Atlanta's streets to mourn the fallen leader of the civil rights movement.

Harlingen, TX

When Lon C. Hill, the founder of Harlingen, deeded these acres to cemetery trustees for a token dollar in 1912, he was formalizing a burial ground that had already received its first grave three years earlier. Like many South Texas cemeteries of its era, it was originally laid out in separate sections for Anglos, Hispanics, African Americans, and infants — divisions abandoned after the city took it over in 1947. The tombstones and grave decorations still preserve the borderland's braided cultural traditions.

Huntsville, TX

In 1871, businessman William Koehl donated an acre north of Huntsville so the African American residents of Pine Prairie could establish a church, led by deacons W.T. Watkins and Matthew Bryant and Reverend W. Watkins. The building doubled as the Pine Prairie school, and for over a century Harmony Grove was the community's only Black church. After fire destroyed it in 1978 — a neighbor rescued the bell — the congregation rebuilt, and it still holds its August homecoming and sustains youth, nursing-home, and prison ministries.

Harpers Ferry, WV · est. 1963

Brown and 21 men captured the federal arsenal at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah. Cornered by U.S. Marines under Robert E. Lee, Brown was captured, tried, and hanged — becoming a martyr to abolitionists and a warning to the South.

Round Rock, TX

Jacob and Mary Harrell came to Texas with Robertson's colony in 1833 and were among the first to settle the site that became Austin, where Jacob sold his homestead for the grounds of the State Capitol and served as mayor in 1847. In 1848 the family moved to Jacob's headright near this spot, helping organize the new Williamson County government. The cemetery holds Harrell family members and one of the family's enslaved people.

Allentown, PA · est. 1990

Around 1900, the African-American evangelist Harriet A. Baker opened a mission on North Penn Street in Allentown and preached there until her death. Her small storefront ministry took root, and in 1914 it became the first home of St. James A.M.E. Zion Church, which built its permanent home on this spot in 1936. Baker was part of a wider tradition of Black women preachers who founded and sustained congregations at a time when the pulpit was rarely open to them.

Cincinnati, OH

In the 1830s and 40s, Cincinnati sat on the Ohio River just across from the slave state of Kentucky, making it a charged crossroads where the realities of American slavery were impossible to ignore. It was here, during her years living in the city, that Harriet Beecher Stowe witnessed the human toll of bondage firsthand and endured personal grief that deepened her moral conviction. Those experiences fueled Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), a novel that put the cruelty of slavery before a national audience and helped harden Northern opposition in the decade before the Civil War.

Edenton, NC

Born into slavery around 1813 in Edenton, Harriet Jacobs endured years of abuse before escaping north, where she became a writer and abolitionist. Her 1861 memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, gave a rare first-person account of enslavement from a woman's point of view and became one of the era's most important slave narratives. She drew on her early life in this Chowan County town for the book.

Little Elm, TX

The Harrington, Cassady, and Clark Cemeteries are three historically African American burial grounds now sharing 1.77 acres in Denton County. Founded in the 1870s on land owned by Black families — Jacob Cassady bought his plot in 1872, and Zack Rawlings and George Clark theirs in 1876 — the Cassady and Clark grounds were relocated in 1953 when the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Little Elm to create Lewisville Lake. Roughly 170 graves, marked in marble, granite, fieldstone, and funeral-home plates, record the community of the vanished farming settlement of Lloyd.

Winona, TX

Harris Creek Baptist Church took root in 1849 in the Mount Carmel community of East Texas, moving to this higher ground in 1852 after floods drove it from Lott's Spring. Its meetinghouse doubled as a schoolhouse, and Anglo settlers and the people they enslaved worshipped in the same building while seated apart. The adjoining cemetery, in use since at least 1857, holds several hundred graves and veterans of every war from 1812 to Vietnam.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 2005

From around 1900 into the 1950s, the Harrisburg Giants gave the city a place in the golden age of Black baseball. Run for decades by Colonel William Strothers until his death in 1933, the club was one of 27 major Negro League teams and finished second in the Eastern Colored League in 1925. Its rosters glittered with talent — Hall-of-Famer Oscar Charleston among them — and the team played its home games at Island Park through 1957.

Houston, TX

This burial ground took shape as African Americans settled around Harrisburg's cattle trade and railroads in the mid-1800s, and after emancipation freedpeople organized their own benevolent societies to bury their dead with dignity. Successive Black organizations and, later, one of Houston's oldest African American funeral homes cared for the grounds into the 1960s. Those laid to rest here include a body servant of Sam Houston who witnessed San Jacinto, a soldier of the 84th U.S. Colored Infantry, a buffalo soldier who served in Cuba, and veterans of World War I.

Crosby, TX

Born into slavery around 1845, Harrison Barrett spent years after the 1865 emancipation of Texas slaves gathering his scattered family, reuniting nearly all of them east of the San Jacinto River. He bought this land in 1889 and founded what became Barrett Settlement, establishing a school, church, and cemetery and leading the growing community of homes and farms. His twice-rebuilt homestead still stands, and he lies with family in the cemetery descendants named Journey's End.

Marshall, TX

Long home to the Caddo people, this corner of East Texas drew Anglo settlers from the southern states in the 1830s, many taking Mexican land grants before Texas won independence in 1836. Organized in 1839 and named for revolutionary leader Jonas Harrison, Harrison County became the most populous and among the richest counties in antebellum Texas — a cotton economy built on slavery that, after emancipation, left it with a large Black population. The Texas and Pacific Railway later made Marshall a major rail center, its shops and offices anchoring the town's growth.

Louisville, KY

After the Civil War, as large Kentucky estates were subdivided, African American families settled the land along Harrods Creek and in nearby Prospect and "The Neck." In 1919 entrepreneur James Taylor purchased land from Mary Shirley Helm and began selling lots to Black families, and his Taylor Subdivision grew into a thriving suburban community. The Jacob School, built in 1916 and named for former slave Jefferson Jacob, still stands as a landmark of that world.

Erie, PA · est. 2019

Born in Erie, Harry T. Burleigh rose to become one of the most influential figures in American music. A gifted baritone and composer, he studied under Antonín Dvořák and set the verse of poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes to song. Above all, Burleigh transformed the spirituals of the enslaved into concert art, championing them as America's only truly original music.

Old River-Winfree, TX

This small graveyard on the banks of Old River began with a tract granted to Texas immigrant Robert Wiseman in 1831 and sold in 1853 to Dr. Edward Hartman, whose first wife was likely its earliest burial. Now marked mostly by shallow depressions, handmade brick crypts, and a few stones, the cemetery preserves rural Texas burial customs—including bricks probably fired at a nearby 1870s brickyard. A separate slave cemetery is believed to lie on adjacent land.

Baltimore, MD

In mid-twentieth-century Baltimore, tennis was still largely divided along racial lines, and Harvey J. Burns, Jr. (1923–1988) devoted himself to opening the game to Black players in his city. Working as a teacher, promoter, and mentor, he coached young people and helped them find a path into competitive tennis at a time when those doors did not open easily. This memorial marks the legacy of a local pioneer who used sport to widen opportunity.

Washington, TX

This 1853 house of brick, white pine, and cedar was built by enslaved workers for Basil M. Hatfield, a soldier of the Battle of San Jacinto whose steamboat worked the Brazos River trade. His nearby store in Washington had served the Republic of Texas for its meetings and hosted the Republic's last inaugural ball before Texas joined the Union. The home was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Arlington, TX

Named for Tennessee-born pioneer Harvey Hawkins, who received a 160-acre land grant signed by Governor Sam Houston in 1860, this cemetery began as a family plot for the Tate Springs community. By local memory an enslaved man named Poly Penn was the first buried here, though his grave is unmarked; the earliest lettered stone dates to 1868. As the settlement grew, the plot became a public burial ground in 1890, chronicling the pioneer families who put down roots in the mid-1800s.

Midway, TX

Patrick Hayes was an Irish immigrant who reached Texas around 1836 and promptly took up arms in the war that won Texas its independence. Rewarded and restless, he built a sprawling world of cotton plantations along the Trinity River, practiced herbal medicine as the locally beloved "Dr. Hayes," and in 1857 opened this family burial ground on his Seven Oaks plantation. Beneath its soil lie Hayes kin, and by long belief the enslaved people and servants whose graves went unrecorded, making the quiet cemetery a witness to a pioneering family's rise and the human cost woven into it.

Richards, TX

Thomas Jefferson Haynie and his wife Sarah Jane came from Georgia in 1855 and, with the labor of enslaved people, built a two-story home of native pine, post oak, and rock. Haynie was active in local politics and gave land for the Fairview School. In 1923 the farm passed to Dr. Guy Cecil Sanders, a prominent Richards physician, and became a hub for community gatherings, Fourth of July celebrations, and political rallies.

New Orleans, LA

From 1915 to 1957, this ground held Heinemann Park, later Pelican Stadium, home of New Orleans' first professional sports team, the baseball Pelicans. Negro league clubs such as the Black Pelicans and Creoles also played their home games here, and the field hosted spring training and exhibitions featuring Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Jackie Robinson. For four decades it was the heart of the city's baseball life.

Henderson, TX

Believed to be Henderson's oldest, this cemetery took shape in the mid-1840s and holds soldiers from every U.S. war between the War of 1812 and Vietnam. More than half of it served the city's African American community, and among its graves lie Black merchants, a businessman, and a veterinarian, two Texas A&M University presidents, judges, legislators, and a sea captain—its once-segregating wrought-iron fence now removed. Shaded by magnolias and crepe myrtles, its Old South landscape reads like a directory of the town's whole history.

Bandera, TX

Hendrick Arnold, a free Black man who fought in the Siege of Bexar and the Battle of San Jacinto, was granted land for his service in the Texas Revolution, including this Bandera County tract. He passed acreage to his family, and over generations the ground became a burial place—formally recorded in 1922 as a colored burial ground used by local African American families. Neglect erased many headstones, but research has recovered dozens of unmarked graves and the names of those laid to rest here.

Sherman, TX

John Hendrix led his family and seven others to Grayson County in 1846, their first campsite still marked by a large boulder in this cemetery. A successful farmer and nurseryman, he became a prominent citizen and established this one-acre burial ground, where the first known grave — an infant of the Perdue family — dates to 1848. A section in the northwest corner was set aside for the burial of enslaved people, a sober record within the roughly forty-five marked graves.

Gallatin, TX

Henry Cemetery grew from the graves of a remarkable migration: Woodson Henry and roughly thirty-five Muskogee (Creek) families who left Chambers County, Alabama, for Texas in the 1830s. The burial ground was founded in 1852 when Ezekiel Henry laid his daughter to rest, and it soon held the whole extended family. A section in the northeast corner holds African American burials, including Peter Johnson, a formerly enslaved man given Jinkins family property upon his emancipation, and a World War I veteran, Aaron Quarll.