African American History

Brownwood, TX

Organized in 1888 and named for AME Bishop Benjamin Franklin Lee, Lee Chapel gathered Brownwood's Black community first in a Baptist church and then in a brush arbor at the home of its pastor, the Rev. George E. Smith—who also founded the town's first school for Black children. In 1906 the congregation's building was moved to this site, where the church has continued to serve ever since. Its story braids together worship, education, and community survival under segregation.

Navasota, TX

This African-American Methodist congregation traces to 1860 and, after the Civil War, built a church in 1866 in a Navasota neighborhood called 'Freeman's Town.' Formally organized in 1876, the group raised its present Gothic Revival sanctuary in 1896 — worshipping in the basement until the building was finished — and renamed itself to honor its pastor, the Rev. Edward Lee. With its arched and stained-glass windows and tower entry, the church has served its members for well over a century.

Washington, PA · est. 1953

Built in 1812 in the young town of Washington, this brick house became the home of Dr. Francis Julius LeMoyne, a physician remembered as one of western Pennsylvania's most outspoken abolitionists in the decades before the Civil War. LeMoyne pushed his convictions in directions few contemporaries dared, later erecting the first crematory in the United States and championing public education and reform. The house survives as the home of the Washington County Historical Society, keeping that reform-minded legacy in place.

Hertford County, NC

A Baptist leader in the years just after emancipation, Lemuel W. Boone organized North Carolina's first Black Baptist association in 1866, giving newly freed congregations a shared institution of their own. He also served as a trustee of Shaw University, one of the South's early colleges for African Americans. His grave lies about two miles southeast.

Cuero, TX

Born in Cuero, Leonard Roy Harmon joined the Navy in 1939 and served as a mess attendant aboard the cruiser U.S.S. San Francisco. During the Battle of Guadalcanal in November 1942, as enemy fire raked the ship, Harmon helped evacuate the wounded and was killed shielding an injured shipmate with his own body, earning the Navy Cross. In 1943 the destroyer escort U.S.S. Harmon—the first U.S. warship named for a Black man—was christened by his mother.

Corydon, IN

Built in 1891 as the Corydon Colored School, this building educated African American children in southern Indiana at a time when schooling was rigidly segregated. It served as both an elementary and secondary school, holding its first graduation on May 14, 1897. In 1987 it was renamed for Leora Brown Farrow, who taught there from 1924 to 1950 and gave the school much of its enduring identity.

Brazoria, TX

Between 1848 and 1851, enslaved workers built this plantation house for Levi Jordan, hauling materials shipped by sea from Florida to Velasco and up the San Bernard River. It stands in the heart of Texas's antebellum plantation belt, where cotton and sugar were worked by forced labor. The site later became one of Texas's most significant archaeological windows into enslaved and freed communities.

Independence, TX

In 1871, just years after Emancipation, formerly enslaved members of Independence's Baptist community founded their own congregation and named it Liberty in honor of their new freedom. Beginning with 150 members, they worshipped in a series of buildings before completing the present cruciform sanctuary — with its central steeple and gabled entry — in 1900. The building endures as an architectural landmark of the town's African American community.

Allentown, PA · est. 2022

In the anxious autumn of 1777, with the British army marching on Philadelphia, the Continental Congress ordered the city's bells spirited away so they couldn't be melted into cannon. The great State House bell traveled north by wagon and rested for months beneath the floorboards of Zion's Reformed Church here in Allentown before returning home in 1778. Decades later, antislavery reformers seized on its inscription—'Proclaim liberty throughout all the land'—and renamed it the Liberty Bell, turning a cracked colonial bell into an enduring emblem of freedom.

Independence, TX

Tradition holds that the first people buried here were enslaved Africans laid to rest before the Civil War ended in 1865, with the oldest marked graves dating to the late 1860s. When J.C. McCrocklin sold the land to the Colored People's Cemetery Association in 1907, the deed already described a burial ground long used by local African Americans. Six marked graves belong to people born into slavery, and more than twenty mark military service.

Henderson, TX

Organized in the Sugar Hill community in 1866, in the first year of freedom after Emancipation, Liberty Missionary Baptist Church joined the Mt. Zion Baptist Association in 1868 and built a new sanctuary beside its original church and school in 1897. Membership climbed from 68 in 1927 to a record 159 by 1945, and the congregation affiliated with the Baptist Missionary Association at every level around mid-century. A modern facility replaced the earlier buildings in 1991, continuing a tradition of worship and outreach.

Hempstead, TX

Leonard W. Groce built Liendo in 1853 as a cotton plantation home famed for its lavish antebellum hospitality — a way of life sustained by enslaved labor. In 1873 it passed to the philosopher Dr. Edmund Duncan Montgomery and his wife, the pioneering Texas sculptor Elisabet Ney, who made it their lifelong homestead and are buried on the grounds.

Hawkins, TX

Born in the Fouke community in 1891, Lillian Richard left rural Wood County for Dallas and in 1925 took a job with Quaker Oats, becoming one of several African American women who toured the country portraying "Aunt Jemima" to promote pancake mix. The character drew on a demeaning minstrel-show stereotype even as the work gave Richard a 23-year career, until a stroke sent her home to Fouke, where she died in 1956. Her hometown was later named the "Pancake Capital of Texas."

Barnes, TX

Lilly Island Cemetery grew from the freedom communities that formed in this corner of Polk County after emancipation, settled in part by formerly enslaved people who had come to Texas from Savannah, Georgia. Two of them, Cal Hamilton and Delila Scott, asked the plantation's heirs for land to worship on, and by the late 1880s a Missionary Baptist congregation met at what became the cemetery site. Many residents farmed or worked for the W.T. Carter lumber company until, after World War II, African American workers moved to the cities and the settlements declined; the earliest burial here dates to 1884.

Progress, PA · est. 1994

Founded in 1827 by the Wesley Union A.M.E. Zion Church, this cemetery became a resting place for central Pennsylvania's Black community across generations. Among its graves are those of journalist and Civil War officer T. Morris Chester, educator and abolitionist William Howard Day, and more than twenty Civil War veterans. Each headstone marks a life that helped build free Black institutions in the decades around emancipation.

Gettysburg, PA · est. 2003

Founded in 1867 by the Sons of Good Will, Lincoln Cemetery gave Gettysburg's African American citizens and soldiers a dignified resting place they were otherwise denied. Roughly thirty veterans of the United States Colored Troops lie here — men who fought for the Union but were barred by segregation from burial in the town's famous National Cemetery. Later generations of Black veterans from the Spanish-American War through Korea joined them in ground first known as Good Will Cemetery and renamed for Lincoln in 1920.

Dallas, TX

In the depths of the Jim Crow era, Dallas needed a modern high school for its Black students, whose only option had been the overcrowded Booker T. Washington campus miles away. Backed partly by a New Deal Public Works Administration grant, Lincoln High School opened in January 1939 with 1,255 students and a striking Moderne building whose glass-brick tower became a neighborhood landmark. Under founding principal Tueria Dell Marshall, enrollment surged past 3,000, and the school produced more than 200 educators among its distinguished alumni.

Lower Oxford Township, PA · est. 1967

Chartered in 1854 as the Ashmun Institute, this school was founded by the Rev. John Miller Dickey to provide higher education to men of African ancestry at a time when almost no such opportunity existed in America. Renamed Lincoln University in 1866, it opened its doors as an interracial and international institution. It became one of the nation's first degree-granting historically Black colleges, educating generations of leaders across the United States and Africa.

Metamora, IL

In the autumn of 1858, Illinois was the crucible of a Senate race that riveted the whole country, as Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas crisscrossed the state arguing over slavery's future in the western territories. This spot in Woodford County heard both men speak within days of one another that September and October. Though Douglas won the seat, the contest lifted Lincoln to national prominence and set the stage for the presidency two years later.

Gatesville, TX

Shortly after the Civil War, freed people in Coryell County founded a community four miles west of Gatesville and named it Lincolnville in honor of Abraham Lincoln. Experienced farmers and ranchers, the founding families lived off the Leon River valley's catfish and game while building the institutions long denied them—Bethlehem Baptist Church, organized in 1872, and eventually Lincolnville School No. 62, which served the county's Black children until rural schools were consolidated in 1943. Despite racial strife and frontier hardship, the community endured, and a few descendants of its founders remain today.

Randolph, TX

Tennessee native Thomas Lindsey brought his family to Fannin County in 1837 and, in the late 1840s, gave four acres for a school and cemetery — the first burial here being one of his enslaved workers, a stark reminder of slavery's reach into the antebellum Texas frontier. The one-room schoolhouse beside the graves doubled as a community church, and when the railroad town of Randolph rose in 1887, a wooden sidewalk linked it to the old grounds. Pioneers, farmers, doctors, a church-founding minister, and veterans of several wars all rest here.

Dayton, TX

Founded in the 1850s to serve the people of West Liberty—now Dayton—this thirteen-acre burial ground grew informally, its sections known by family names like Smith and Alford, with a separately reserved area for Black residents now called Acie Cemetery. Many graves are unmarked; the earliest documented is that of six-day-old Joseph Monroe Linney in 1880. Those laid to rest here include pioneer settlers, elected officials, and veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Bay City, TX

By 1894 Matagorda County counted twenty African American schools serving more than 700 children, and Bay City's first — a donated one-room frame building — grew into a school named for Booker T. Washington. Among its long-serving teachers was Linnie McHenry Roberts, a Prairie View–educated educator who taught elementary classes for 32 years and earned wide respect for her care of students and community. In 1961 the school board opened a modern brick school and named it in her honor, a building that still stands as a tribute to her legacy.

Manor, TX

The town of Littig was platted in 1883 on land donated by Jackson Morrow, a formerly enslaved man, along the Houston & Texas Central Railway. Its cemetery, established in 1891, became the resting place for many of the community's freedpeople, including Morrow and his family, with the earliest marked grave dating to 1895. Though the town shrank in the mid-20th century, the cemetery remains active as a witness to one of Travis County's freedmen's towns.

Ladonia, TX

In 1912, the African American families of the Stall Cup community near Ladonia had no nearby house of worship of their own, so they founded Little Bethel Baptist Church in the heart of the Jim Crow era. Around 1932 Deacon John Marshall relocated the congregation into Ladonia when bad roads began thinning its membership, and in 1938 members bought the present property and rebuilt after fire destroyed the earlier structure. For a full century the church anchored its community with charity, leadership, and spiritual life.

Dallas, TX

Little Egypt took root in 1883 when Jeff Hill, a formerly enslaved man, bought about thirty acres and began a settlement that grew to include the Egypt Chapel Baptist Church and a one-room school. Its distance from Dallas let it keep its rural character for more than seventy years, even as the city crept closer. In 1962 the community collectively sold its land to developers, and the church relocated to south Dallas, where it still stands.

Jewett, TX

Little Flock Baptist Church took root in this corner of Leon County in 1854, and by 1860 its churchyard had become a burial ground for the pioneer families—Baldwin, Lamb, Shipp, Thomas and others—who farmed the surrounding land. When the Bear Grass Coal Company opened two mines here between 1907 and the early 1920s, new families arrived, including African American and Hispanic miners now resting in unmarked graves. Veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars, preachers, landowners, and even a beloved fiddler named Tom Foley lie together in this ground.

Hamilton Township, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, freedom seekers escaping slavery in Kentucky and the South pushed north through Ohio, and southwestern Ohio's rivers were both obstacles and guideposts. At this spot along the Little Miami, people fleeing bondage waded across the water on their way to Butterworth Station, one of the Quaker-linked safe havens that laced Warren County into the wider Underground Railroad network. The 2022 marker, placed by Friends of the Twenty Mile House, fixes that dangerous night crossing to a real place on the map.

Grand Prairie, TX

Chartered in 1903 by the Prince Hall Masons of Texas, this African American Masonic lodge was first built near the Grand Prairie community known as "The Line." In 1944 the lodge moved its building to the Dalworth community, buying a $200 lot in one of the few areas where Black residents were then permitted to own property. Its members, leaders in the local Black community, kept the lodge as a center for gatherings, education, and public meetings.

Salisbury, NC

Founded in 1879 as Zion Wesley Institute by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, this school became Livingstone College in 1885 and was named for the British missionary and explorer David Livingstone. Under the Rev. Joseph Charles Price, its president from 1882 to 1893, it grew into a leading center for educating African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South. It stands five blocks west.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2025

Local 8 of the Industrial Workers of the World organized Philadelphia's waterfront dockworkers from 1913 to 1923, growing into one of the country's largest and most powerful unions. Under the leadership of Ben Fletcher, it stood out as a Black-led, multiracial local that deliberately united workers across ethnic and racial lines. It fought for better wages, safer conditions, and a solidarity that crossed the color line at a time when most unions did not.

Cuero, TX

These three acres are the oldest known African American burial ground in DeWitt County, tied to the once-thriving farming community of Lockhart whose earliest settlers included sharecroppers and former slaves. Formally purchased in 1910 by the Lockhart Colored Cemetery Association, the grounds hold 263 known graves—among them many veterans and Paul Wimbish, a former slave who became a successful county businessman. Handmade concrete headstones with decorative tilework and hand-etched inscriptions exemplify a Southern folk tradition of memorializing family and faith.

Lockhart, TX

Built in 1923 for Lockhart's African American students—reportedly with materials salvaged from a former white school—this two-story brick and stucco schoolhouse was designed and partly funded through the Rosenwald Foundation, with the district and Black citizens raising the rest. Before it opened, Black children had studied in scattered churches, lodges, and even a funeral parlor. Accredited in 1926 and renamed G.W. Carver High School in 1946, it closed with integration in 1964 and later housed a Head Start program.

Shippensburg, PA · est. 2007

Since the early 19th century, Locust Grove Cemetery has been the resting place of enslaved and free Black residents of the Shippensburg area, and the site of the town's first African American church, founded in the 1830s. In 1842 Edward Shippen Burd granted the land to the local Black community, and for well over a century it remained the only public cemetery in the area open to African Americans. Among its graves are twenty-six Civil War soldiers, alongside veterans of every American conflict through Vietnam.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2005

On August 1, 1842, Philadelphia's Black community gathered to celebrate the anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies—a hopeful marker of freedom in a nation where slavery still reigned. A white mob descended on the peaceful parade, and over three days of violence African Americans were beaten, their homes ransacked, and a church and abolitionist meeting hall burned to the ground. The Lombard Street Riot was one of a wave of anti-Black assaults that convulsed the antebellum city.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

Opened in 1754, the London Coffee House was a hub of colonial Philadelphia's political and mercantile life, where traders, officials, and townsfolk gathered to talk business and news. But its bustling floor carried a darker function: enslaved Africans, newly arrived by ship, were inspected and sold here at public auction. The site captures the uncomfortable truth that even in the cradle of American liberty, commerce and human bondage stood side by side.

Reagan, TX

Founded by former slaves in connection with a Methodist Episcopal church, this three-acre burial ground served the Black community of Long Branch for more than a century. Families who had come from Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia by 1870 built a two-room school, chose teachers from their own ranks, farmed as tenants, and gradually became landowners. Their sons served in every American conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam—including Anthony Shaw of the 104th U.S. Colored Infantry—and among those buried here is Silvia King, who recorded her remarkable life story before her death in the 1930s.

Longview, TX

Opened in 1930 on Gum Street as the Longview Negro High School, this campus gave African American students a secondary education in the era of legal segregation. Rebuilt after a 1946 fire and later renamed for beloved teacher Mary C. Womack, it produced graduates guided by principals honored in the East Texas Black Educators Hall of Fame. A federal desegregation order finally closed and razed the school.

Hitchcock, TX

The education of Hitchcock's African American children began in 1903 in a private home and a Baptist church annex, and a permanent school opened in 1914 after residents raised money through fish fries and other fundraisers to buy the lot. Long known as the Hitchcock Colored School, it was renamed in 1949 for beloved teacher and principal Lorraine Crosby. Despite scarce funding, staff and families built up sports teams and a scout troop; the school graduated classes from 1960 until integration in the mid-1960s.

Seguin, TX

This one-room adobe house was built in 1849 for German immigrant Justus Gombert in the young town of Seguin, later stuccoed and enlarged over the years. After the Civil War it served as a campground for the Freedmen's Bureau, and Texas Ranger captain Ben McCulloch briefly owned it in 1870. Threatened with demolition, 'Los Nogales'—Spanish for walnuts—became the first preservation project of the Seguin Conservation Society in 1952.

Beeville, TX

Black education in Bee County began in 1876 in Stephen Canada's store, then a small frame schoolhouse, chartered by the county as "Colored Community School Twelve." A larger frame school followed on North Burke Street, where principal J.R. Lockett matched the offerings of the town's white schools until fire destroyed it in 1929. With help from the Chicago-based Julius Rosenwald Fund, a brick school with four classrooms and an auditorium opened in 1931, named for carpenters Mose Lott and Allen Canada — serving until integration closed it in 1964.

Goliad, TX

Acquired in 1896 and soon renamed for a local African American family, Lott Cemetery holds the graves of trail drivers, cattle-industry workers, and everyday families whose modest wooden crosses and sculpted obelisks trace the ups and downs of the local economy. When the 1902 tornado destroyed a nearby Methodist church and neighborhood, several dozen victims were buried in a communal grave along its eastern edge. Among those resting here are more than thirty veterans, two centenarians, and a man known only as "Bingo," raised by a prominent cattleman's wife.

Louisville, KY

In 1886 a group of prominent Black Louisvillians—among them Bishop W. H. Miles—incorporated this 31-acre burial ground when segregation barred African Americans from many cemeteries. Its graves hold figures central to Black Louisville: a co-founder of Red Cross Hospital, educator Atwood S. Wilson, blues guitarist Sylvester Weaver, and jockey William "Uncle Bill" Walker, who won the 1877 Kentucky Derby and became a leading authority on Thoroughbred pedigree.

Bremond, TX

Founded by T.W. Parker in 1920 as Bremond Colored High School, this school educated young African Americans during the era of legal segregation, focusing on vocational and agricultural training. It was renamed in the 1940s to honor Charles Love, its longtime principal from 1925 to 1965. The school closed in 1965 when its students integrated into Bremond High School.

Lubbock, TX

Clyde Trusty opened the Lubbock Cotton Club in a renovated army quonset hut in 1938, and it quickly grew into one of west Texas's largest dance floors, big enough for 1,600 revelers. Western swing king Bob Wills played early, and under later owner Ralph Lowe the club drew national acts including Elvis Presley—who met Buddy Holly there in 1955—along with African American artists such as Charles Brown. Fire destroyed the original building in 1958, but the club carried on elsewhere until 1980.

Cheltenham Township, PA · est. 1974

Near here stood "Roadside," the home of Lucretia Mott (1793–1880), a Quaker minister whose moral force helped drive some of the century's great reform movements. A tireless abolitionist, she helped organize the 1848 Seneca Falls convention and championed women's rights, temperance, and peace. Her faith and eloquence made her a leader when few women spoke publicly at all.

Crockett, TX

Born in the Wheeler Springs community in 1878, Lula Demby earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Prairie View College and came home to teach, becoming principal of the two-room, eight-grade Wheeler Springs School. She worked tirelessly to widen her students' opportunities and, beyond the classroom, helped her community build a canning kitchen, a garden, and a school cafeteria. She lived to ninety-eight and was buried in the family cemetery.

Throckmorton, TX

In October 1886, 19-year-old Tom Farrar, one of several African American cowboys working area ranches, was arrested after two bodies were found at a dugout he had stopped at, identified by a distinctive horseshoe print. Held in the local jail, he was seized during the night by a mob of dozens of men, dragged behind a horse, and hanged from an elm on the nearby creek. In the aftermath, African Americans all but vanished from Throckmorton County for generations.

Georgetown, TX

Macedonia Baptist Church began in 1881 with worship under a brush arbor in Matilda Lewis's back yard, organized by nine families of Georgetown's African American community. Trustees soon secured this site for a frame sanctuary, replaced by a larger building in 1914, and the congregation joined the La Grange Baptist District Association in 1885. For well over a century it has anchored the spiritual and civic life of Black Georgetown.

Abilene, TX

In the Jim Crow West Texas of 1898, Abilene's Black community built its own institutions of faith and learning, and Macedonia Baptist Church became one of the sturdiest. Organized by the Rev. J. H. Herron with a handful of charter members who bought this ground and raised a frame sanctuary by 1903, the church did far more than hold Sunday services — it hosted the first commencement for the city's African American students around 1923 and steadied the community through decades that were sometimes genuinely dangerous for its pastors. Under H. D. Cumby's long ministry it grew into a modern building, and its leaders are credited with easing tensions through the turbulent 1960s and '70s.

Hemphill, TX

Founded in 1885, Macedonia Baptist Church anchored an African American community in the pine country of East Texas, and its cemetery became a chronicle of that community's endurance. Among its more than 500 graves lie people born into slavery who lived to see freedom, veterans of both World Wars, and elders who passed the century mark. The roughly 193 unmarked graves speak as loudly as the headstones—a stark record of the poverty and inequality Black families faced at the turn of the 20th century.

Houston, TX

Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church was born in the late 1890s in Freedmantown, the Fourth Ward neighborhood settled by formerly enslaved people after emancipation. From a one-story wood sanctuary bought in 1907, the congregation grew across the twentieth century into ever-larger buildings with auditoriums and classrooms. Through it all the church remained an anchor of worship and community uplift.

Dallas, TX

In 1884, Rev. A.R. Griggs and Jane Johnson Calloway Endsley organized Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church to serve Dallas's African American Baptist community. After a series of relocations in the early twentieth century, the congregation settled at its present site in 1950 under the leadership of Rev. L.J. Taylor and his wife, Portia, who became strong advocates for education in the community. Anchored by its long legacy and active membership, Macedonia has expanded its property and remained a cornerstone of Black community life in Dallas.

Jefferson, TX

After the Civil War and emancipation, freedpeople in western Marion County gathered under the leadership of Henry Smith and, on land belonging to a white settler named Leigh High, organized Macedonia Methodist Episcopal Church in April 1872. Within two years the congregation founded its own school, and over the following decades it built and rebuilt sanctuaries as fire, growth, and hard times demanded. A 1968 merger renewed the congregation, which endures as Macedonia United Methodist Church.

Hempstead, TX

Escaping slavery in Alabama, Madison "Matt" Kilpatrick reached Waller County before the Civil War and built a remarkable life in freedom. A gifted blacksmith who improved farm implements, he became a landowner and a leader among freedmen, serving as Waller County's first treasurer from 1873 to 1876. His public office during Reconstruction placed him among the first generation of Black Texans to hold local power.

Elkhart, TX

Like many early African American burial grounds, Magnolia Cemetery left little written record, and its story survives largely through oral tradition. Land was reportedly given by farmer E. P. Murray, and its oldest marked grave belongs to Isham Murray, a former slave born in 1805. At least sixteen other African Americans born in slavery rest here, alongside veterans of World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

Beaumont, TX

This congregation began in November 1890 with Christians worshiping in a schoolhouse and in members' homes, then bought land and organized Evergreen Baptist Church under its first pastor, Rev. Dickerson. Renamed Magnolia Baptist Church in 1900, it acquired its present location in 1925 and grew steadily across the 20th century, dedicating new sanctuaries in 1981 and 2011. It took the name Magnolia Missionary Baptist Church in 1995 and has supported missions from Beaumont to Haiti and Africa.

Kirbyville, TX

Founded around 1824 as "Pinetucky" by the Wright brothers and renamed Magnolia Springs when its post office opened in 1850, this East Texas community grew up around its churches and this shared burial ground. The earliest known grave dates to 1858, and in 1860 the Fellowship Baptist Church bought land here for worship and burials. In 1902 the graveyard grew when the Black congregation of Springhill Church purchased adjoining acreage, and today more than 900 marked and unmarked graves hold the community's early preachers, physicians, and planters.

Robertson County, KY

On a nearby hilltop lie the home site and grave of Major George M. Bedinger (1756–1843), a Pennsylvania-born patriot who fought in the Revolution—helping defend Boonesborough in 1779 and serving at the siege of Yorktown in 1781. Returning to Kentucky in 1784, he was among the first to survey this region, later serving in the state legislature and in Congress. An opponent of slavery, he freed his enslaved people when each reached the age of thirty.

Tyler, TX

Major John Dean's family bought this East Texas land in 1863 with pay he sent home while serving the Confederacy, and after the war he built a home worthy of it. Using heart-pine lumber he milled and seasoned himself, and brick fired from farm clay by a formerly enslaved man named Jesse Duckinfield, Dean raised the finest house in the community in 1872. Generations of his family have kept it since.