African American History

Victoria, TX

When Victoria voted to create an independent school district in 1898, its plan laid bare the era's racial order: eight schools, four for Anglo children and four for African American children. Prominent architect Jules Leffland designed the imposing three-story building completed on this site in 1902, later renamed to honor early trustee J.D. Mitchell. Fires in 1935 and 1943 cost the school its top floor, but the building endured and still serves as an educational center today.

Fort Wayne, IN

This memorial preserves the most famous lines of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered at the March on Washington. By binding King's vision to the Declaration of Independence's promise that all are created equal, it links the civil rights movement to the nation's founding ideals. Its placement in Fort Wayne reflects how communities far from Washington claimed that dream as their own.

Lexington, TX

Moab was one of many "freedom colonies" African Americans founded across Lee County after emancipation—communities of Black landowners farming their own ground for the first time. Families raised cotton, corn, and livestock and followed seasonal "cotton picks" across Texas and New Mexico to supplement their income. By the 1930s the settlement had a school, two churches, a cemetery, and a post office; today Mt. Nebo A.M.E. Church remains as its anchor, and descendants return each year.

Gainesville, TX

Ned Moffett, Sr. (1842–1924), a Missouri native whose family was recorded in early census records as Mulatto, owned 90 acres along Elm Creek that he opened for celebrations by Gainesville's African American community. In 1943 the city bought the land from his heirs to create Moffett Park, and the following year it hosted a major Juneteenth celebration. Though use declined after nearby Leonard Park was integrated in the mid-1960s, the park endures as a monument to the city's African American community life.

Owensboro, KY

Born in Owensboro in 1926, Moneta J. Sleet, Jr. became one of the defining photojournalists of the twentieth century, working four decades for Jet and Ebony. His lens captured both the African independence movements and the American civil rights struggle, walking alongside figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. from Selma to the Nobel ceremony in Oslo. In 1969 his tender photograph of a grieving Coretta Scott King at Dr. King's funeral earned him the Pulitzer Prize — the first African American to win it in photography.

Rusk County, TX

Built by Julien Sidney Devereux (1805–1856)—a justice of the peace, county commissioner, and legislator—Monte Verdi was a frontier interpretation of southern Greek Revival architecture, set so high on his roughly 10,000-acre plantation that much of Rusk, Cherokee, and Nacogdoches counties could be seen from its upstairs porch. It was one of the most significant antebellum plantations in Texas, worked by scores of enslaved people whose labor made its scale possible. The house was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Cushing, TX

Monte Verdi was the 10,700-acre plantation of Julien Sidney Devereux, and this marker names the enslaved men, women, and children whose labor sustained it—people like Scott and Tabby, born in the 1780s and 1790s, carried from Georgia to Alabama to Texas, and the many families documented in 1846 and in the 1856 probate that listed 80 enslaved people. Freed in 1865, they built new lives on the plantation's former lands, and their descendants—rarely taking the Devereux name—carried surnames like Anderson, Booker, Henry, and Lewis into the surrounding communities. One couple, Green and Phoebe, founded the Anadarko Christian church and school in 1868.

Moore, TX

Moore Catholic Cemetery began before its land was even formally donated, with the earliest known grave that of Christine Tehas, who died in 1894. Ben Duncan deeded the ground to the parish in 1902, and the headstones—mostly Spanish, but also English and German—reflect the mingled peoples who settled this South Texas frontier. Among those buried here are pioneer settlers, veterans of Indian conflicts and both World Wars, and a Virginia-born formerly enslaved man.

Austin, TX

Around 1850 the Irish-born merchant Martin Moore and his wife Elizabeth left their Austin business for a 521-acre farm north of town, raising five children in the log structures they built here. After Martin's death, Elizabeth sold the homestead in 1866 to Judge John Hancock, and it is believed his formerly enslaved man Orange and family lived on the land in the late 1860s. The sensitively restored cabins survive as a rare example of local pioneer farmstead architecture.

Dallas, TX

When Dallas's YMCA expanded in the late 1920s, African American citizens of North Dallas raised $75,000—overshooting their goal—and, with a matching gift from the Rosenwald Fund, opened the Moorland YMCA in 1930. Named for YMCA leader Dr. Jesse Edward Moorland, the Italian Renaissance Revival building became a rare public gathering place for the Black community: a gym, a youth and education center, lodging for travelers turned away from segregated hotels, and a meeting ground for the local civil rights movement. It closed in 1970, and the building later became home to the Dallas Black Dance Theatre.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 1953

Consecrated by Count von Zinzendorf, this burial ground served Moravian Bethlehem from 1742 to 1910. In keeping with the community's belief that all are equal in death, only flat gravestones were permitted, laid in orderly rows without grand monuments. Here rest people of many nationalities and races — European settlers alongside Native American and African converts — a quiet testament to the Moravians' unusually inclusive spiritual vision.

Sulphur Springs, TX

In 1868, just after emancipation, African American worshippers in the Old Tarrant settlement gathered under the Rev. Mike Wiggins to form what became this congregation. When the new county seat of Sulphur Springs was laid out, the church moved into town in 1876 and has been a community anchor ever since. After a 1974 fire, neighboring churches and local businesses helped rebuild it, a testament to its standing in the wider community.

Woodville, TX

In 1906, Tyler County resident John Cruse donated two acres to the Moss Hill community for a church and cemetery, and burials began as the local Baptist congregation grew. The first documented interment was Lane Siggers in 1907, followed by many of the area's leading civic and religious figures, though unmarked graves suggest still earlier burials. In the 1980s local citizens formed a committee that raised funds to fence and maintain the grounds and revived an annual homecoming tradition.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

In 1787 the formerly enslaved preacher Richard Allen purchased this ground and founded a congregation that would become the mother church of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, the first independent Black church body in the United States. Born of a walkout against segregated worship, Mother Bethel gave African Americans a place to lead and worship on their own terms. The present church, raised in 1889, is the fourth to stand on a site Black Philadelphians have held continuously for more than two centuries.

Corpus Christi, TX

Born in County Kerry, Ireland, in 1833, Margaret Mary Healy immigrated to America in 1845 and eventually settled in Texas, where she married future Corpus Christi mayor John Bernard Murphy. She nursed the sick through yellow fever epidemics, opened hospitals, and helped bring teaching sisters to found the state's first Catholic boarding school. In San Antonio she built a free school and St. Peter Claver Church for African Americans, and founded her own religious congregation — today the Sisters of the Holy Spirit and Mary Immaculate — recruiting young women from Ireland to teach.

Susquehanna Depot, PA · est. 2009

Born in 1810, Theresa Maxis Duchemin became the first American-born Black Catholic nun and a charter member of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the world's first congregation of women religious of color. In 1845 she helped found the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Michigan, a teaching order that endures today. At the invitation of Philadelphia's Bishop John Neumann she established an IHM community and Laurel Hill Academy in Susquehanna County, which operated here until 1923.

Bay City, TX

The Rev. Basil Tolson, an African American farmer who had helped found a rural Matagorda County congregation in 1887, organized Mother Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Bay City in 1906. Its first sanctuary, built in 1907, was destroyed by a 1909 hurricane, but the members quickly rebuilt and sustained outreach and educational programs that continue to anchor the community today.

Bartlett, TX

In 1898 Black laborers who came to Bartlett for the cotton harvest gathered with local families to found what began as Mount Arie Missionary Baptist Church, calling in a minister from Temple to help organize it. Over the decades the congregation moved repeatedly — across a county line, then to steadier ground — weathering lean years and modernizing its building. In 1980 it took the name Mount Ararat and, having begun to integrate after 1977, carried its founders' traditions into a new brick sanctuary.

Lufkin, TX

Mount Calvary Baptist Church began in 1892 when Ellen Grimes asked her employer for the use of a house so that African Americans in the Keltys community could have a church of their own. Under its first pastor, the Rev. J. James, the young congregation grew and moved through four different buildings over the decades. In 1948 the Angelina County Lumber Company deeded land for a permanent site, and the church has served the Lufkin area for well over a century.

Lubbock, TX

Organized in October 1917 by the Rev. A. Wilson, this congregation nearly dissolved in its first years until a strong 1919 cotton harvest drew new families to Lubbock and swelled its membership. Believed to be Lubbock's oldest Black congregation, Mount Gilead became a host for the West Texas Association of Baptist Churches and a longtime center of music and evangelism. It has held a place of community leadership for over a century.

Keller, TX

Religious meetings began near this Tarrant County site in the late 1840s as an offshoot of Lonesome Dove Baptist Church, and in 1850 the Mt. Gilead congregation was chartered under Rev. John Allen Freeman with eight members — two of them enslaved. It was the first church founded after Tarrant County itself was organized in 1849, worshiping in homes and a log schoolhouse on Daniel Barcroft's land. Apart from a few years around 1880, it has met at this spot ever since.

Elizabeth City, NC

Mount Lebanon Church traces its roots to around 1850, when it began as a mission serving Black Methodists in the port town of Elizabeth City. Affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion denomination — a Black-led church born of the fight for religious independence — its congregation has gathered a block and a half north since 1856. Such churches were among the earliest institutions Black Americans built and controlled for themselves.

Austin, TX

Organized in 1889 near Masontown, one of Austin's earliest African American settlements, Mount Olive Baptist Church grew out of a neighborhood alive with post-emancipation optimism and community-building. Its founding meetings were held at Tillotson College, an anchor institution of Black higher education, and the congregation moved through a succession of homes in East Austin as its needs changed. More than a century on, it still worships in the same historically Black district and keeps its ties to Huston-Tillotson.

Arlington, TX

In the summer of 1897, a small group of African American residents led by the Rev. Mr. Squires founded Mount Olive Baptist Church, first on Indiana Street in Arlington. From just sixteen members in 1966, the congregation grew explosively as Arlington boomed — passing 400 by 1976, 3,500 by 1986, and reaching 10,000 by 1997 — moving through ever-larger sanctuaries and building an active community outreach ministry along the way. In 1997 it marked a full century of service.

Kerrville, TX

Founded in September 1902 by the Reverend G. W. Merriweather of San Antonio, Mount Olive Baptist Church first gathered in a small schoolhouse on Paschall Street before raising a white frame building of its own. As the congregation grew, it built a larger brick church in the 1960s and expanded far beyond Sunday worship—offering music lessons, study groups, a mission chorus, and a nutrition site for the elderly. For over a century it has been a pillar of Kerrville's African American community.

Stephenville, TX

Mount Olive Cemetery was established in 1922 when Stephenville's Colored Burial Association bought land from Charles Neblett, in part to reinter graves moved from the segregated West End Cemetery dating back to 1856. The first burial here honored Wallace Howell in May 1922, and the grounds now hold more than 250 known African American graves, with likely dozens more unmarked. The Burial Association tended the cemetery until 1972, and it remains an active burial ground.

Bay City, TX

Tradition holds that enslaved people from nearby plantations along Lower Caney Creek gathered here to worship, continuing their services as free men and women after the Civil War. By 1885 the congregation had acquired this land, and under the Rev. Anthony Morton they built a sanctuary that also served as a community school into about 1930. Though the surrounding population thinned over the 20th century, the church and its cemetery remain visible ties to generations of local families.

Dallas, TX

Known as "The Rock," Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church traces its founding to June 1864, when a white circuit preacher and a group of enslaved people gathered under an elm tree on a Dallas County farm—making it the oldest African American church in the county. After emancipation, freedmen bought land, built homes, and grew the congregation, purchasing property along White Rock Creek by 1888 and later raising a rock building hauled by hand from Jacksboro. Now in Richardson, the church continues its outreach from scholarships to a water well in Ghana.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2023

Built between 1762 and 1765 for the Scottish sea captain John Macpherson, Mount Pleasant so impressed John Adams that he called it 'the most elegant Seat in Pennsylvania.' Its refined Georgian design was financed by a fortune Macpherson made privateering in the Caribbean—and, the historical record shows, by his involvement in the buying and selling of enslaved people. Men and women named Nell, Bernard, Castillis, and Cato were among those enslaved at this beautiful house.

Houston, TX

Houston's Fifth Ward grew after the Civil War as freedmen settled the area, and its earliest institutions were churches. In 1876 the Rev. George W. Booker gathered seven men and women in a one-room store to found Mount Pleasant Baptist Church—an offshoot of Mount Zion, where members had once crossed Buffalo Bayou by skiff to worship. Storms, fires, and a mid-century highway project repeatedly destroyed or displaced their sanctuary, but each time the congregation salvaged what it could and rebuilt, worshiping in a new home by 1951.

Crockett, TX

Founded in 1885, this congregation belonged to the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, a denomination formed by African Americans in the years after emancipation. Its two acres were deeded by T.H. Nelms from his former plantation land to Black church trustees, and the building doubled as the Fodice school until about 1900. A second sanctuary built in 1901 stood until a tornado destroyed it in 1941, yet the congregation carried on.

Weatherford, TX

Built in 1919 on land donated back in 1886 by J.R. Couts, this two-room brick building served as the only school for African American children in Weatherford. Renamed Mount Pleasant Colored School in 1936, it educated Black students during the long decades of legal segregation, when separate and rarely equal facilities were the rule across Texas and the South. Later expanded with an additional frame structure, it stood as the heart of the community's educational life.

Waco, TX

Organized in October 1886 for the African-American community southeast of Waco, this congregation first worshiped under a brush arbor across the street from the marker site. An Anglo Baptist minister, the Rev. Ural Crain, led the members for a year until they called their first African-American pastor, the Rev. Ben Crain. Through music, missions, and outreach it has remained a focal point of the surrounding McLennan County community.

Brenham, TX

Mount Rose, the oldest African American Baptist congregation in Brenham, traces its roots to secret meetings held by runaway slaves and freedmen in the 1850s. After the Civil War, federal troops and a Freedmen's Bureau office at nearby Camptown safeguarded the worship of emancipated Black residents, and the church was formally organized in 1868. Named for founding member Rose Armstead-Whitaker, it has occupied the same site through ever-larger sanctuaries for more than 150 years.

Victoria, TX

Organized in 1872 at the port of Indianola by 25 charter members as a Free Mission church, this African American Baptist congregation twice lost its building to gulf hurricanes in 1875 and 1886. In 1886 the Rev. Robert Greer led more than twenty members inland to Victoria, carrying the salvaged bell and pulpit that anchored their new sanctuary. Renamed Mount Salem American Baptist Church in 1939, the congregation has served its community for more than a century.

Palestine, TX

In 1873, newly freed African Americans in Palestine organized this African Methodist Episcopal congregation, at first sharing a frame building with Missionary Baptists. By the late 1870s the Methodists had built their own chapel and taken the name Mount Vernon, and in the 1920s they raised the present brick sanctuary with its Gothic Revival touches.

Houston, TX

In 1865, the year slavery ended, the Rev. Emanuel Toby — known as "Uncle Toby" — and his friends cut brush and raised an arbor near Buffalo Bayou to worship freely. Two years later Toby bought the Vine Street site for five dollars from his former master, and the young congregation, joined by West Indian missionary Charles Bryant, grew quickly to more than a hundred members. Renamed Mount Vernon in 1879 and settled at this location by 1901, the church has served its Houston community for well over a century.

Athens, TX

Mount Zion Baptist Church organized in 1873 in the rural Black Jack community, where members first worshiped under a brush arbor before raising a frame sanctuary in 1885. Its first pastor, the Rev. Malachiah Reeves, was a Civil War veteran, and later ministers preached while studying at Baylor or Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Growing slowly amid a sparse farming population, the congregation built successive sanctuaries and remains a focal point of community life.

Cuero, TX

Organized in 1869 with fifteen charter members just after the Civil War, this Baptist congregation began in the open-air fashion of the era, worshiping first in a brush arbor and then a log structure near Concrete. A storm and a series of moves finally brought a wooden church to this site in 1890, where the first service was held that Halloween. Remarkably, only four pastors guided the flock across its first century, a testament to the deep continuity of leadership in a close-knit congregation.

Abilene, TX

In 1885 the Reverend James Curry, a missionary from Sherman, organized this congregation, the oldest African American church in Abilene, with the Reverend James Lewis as its first pastor. The worshipers met in a small house near the railroad tracks until about 1907, when a sanctuary rose at 4th and Cherry streets, and the church moved to the north side of town in 1940. For well over a century Mount Zion Baptist has anchored Black community life in Abilene.

Carthage, TX

Mount Zion C. M. E. Church was founded in Carthage on November 2, 1870, when Methodist Bishop Enoch M. Marvin and five formerly enslaved men organized a congregation during an East Texas conference. Early worshippers gathered in a brush arbor before buying land for their first sanctuary in 1881, expanding the church over the decades. For more than a century it has anchored its community with worship, outreach, and education.

Orange, TX

Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, begun in 1871, is the earliest known Black congregation in Orange, born of the organizing efforts of freedmen like Simon Jones and the Minor brothers just years after emancipation. The members raised their first frame sanctuary in 1872, formally organized in 1873, and by 1926 had built the brick church that stands today. Across generations it seeded new congregations and produced many of the community's leaders.

Waco, TX

In the years just after Emancipation, eighteen formerly enslaved men and women gathered to worship under an oak tree on the banks of the Brazos, having once been confined to the balcony of a white congregation's sanctuary. In 1866 they secured their release from that arrangement and chartered churches of their own; the Methodists among them dedicated Mount Zion's first sanctuary in 1873. The congregation grew quickly, spinning off other Black Methodist churches and tying itself closely to the education of local African Americans.

Paris, TX

After emancipation, freedpeople in Paris gathered in informal prayer meetings, drawn to Baptist worship for its message of equal redemption. Rev. Sam McCarley formally organized Mt. Canaan Baptist Church in 1886 in the "TP" neighborhood beside the Texas & Pacific Railroad, where the booming cotton industry employed many Black workers. The congregation built its lasting church in 1900 and has served the same community — mill workers, ginners, and teachers at the segregated Bankhead school — ever since.

Houston, TX

Organized in 1915 in Houston's Fourth Ward, Mt. Carmel Missionary Baptist Church has always stood in the historic Freedmen's Town District founded by formerly enslaved people after emancipation. Known first as Nelson's Chapel and then Zion Rock, it took the name Mt. Carmel in 1921 in response to a sermon, and under the Rev. Robert T. Bingham built a new sanctuary in 1940 — much of its lumber drawn from the pastor's own East Texas lumberyard. Through food pantries, counseling, and meeting space, it became a hub of the community's social and civic life.

Milano, TX

Originally the Watson family burial ground, this site passed to the trustees of Mt. Homer Baptist Church in 1866, its church building doubling as a schoolhouse. Its earliest marked grave, dated 1863, belongs to Zachary Williams, mortally wounded at the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia, and family diaries record that local African American residents were buried in the southeastern section. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2004, it preserves the intertwined histories of white and Black Milam County families.

Blanco, TX

Peyton Roberts was born into slavery in Virginia and gained his freedom in Texas as the Civil War ended, then moved west to farm this land in the Hill Country. The Black settlement that grew around him became known as Peyton Colony, and in 1874 its residents, led by the Rev. Jack Burch, founded Mt. Horeb Baptist Church. Their first sanctuary was a log building that doubled as a schoolhouse, a common pairing in freedmen's communities where faith and literacy advanced together.

Palestine, TX

This historically African-American congregation grew from prayer meetings held in the 1870s under a brush arbor on the land of Jimmy and Moriah Nixon, and the church built in the early 1880s took Moriah's name. A tornado destroyed the original building in 1946, but the congregation rebuilt on the same ground. A school beside the church taught grades one through eight, and members helped establish a nearby high school for African-American students in 1938.

Commerce, TX

Founded in 1896 out of the Cypress District Association, Mt. Moriah Temple Baptist Church became the spiritual and social heart of Commerce's Norris community, where most of the city's African American residents lived. Members provided food, shelter, clothing, and medicine, and built youth and college ministries. Through the turbulent mid-20th century the church was a beacon in a neighborhood then known as a dangerous place, and in the 1960s it organized voter drives, hosted candidates, and linked with the local NAACP. Streets in Norris still bear the names of influential members.

Cedar Creek, TX

Freed from slavery only a decade earlier, African American citizens of Bastrop organized Mt. Olive Baptist Church in 1874, first gathering under a brush arbor before building a sanctuary with a split cedar-log pew. The congregation doubled as a school: Elm Grove School shared the frame building from 1897, enrolling nearly ninety pupils. In 1909 the church bought three acres for a new sanctuary and cemetery, adding a dedicated classroom in 1912, and classes continued there until consolidation with Bastrop in 1957.

Kilgore, TX

As the Civil War ended and slavery collapsed, newly freed African Americans in this corner of East Texas gathered under a brush arbor to worship, forming a Methodist Episcopal congregation that formally organized in 1871. As families put down roots, the church bought two acres in 1891 for a burial ground beside its sanctuary, with graves that trace back even earlier. Generations of pioneers, veterans, Freemasons and community leaders now rest here, still tended by a committee tied to the church that founded it.

Wichita Falls, TX

Founded in 1891 by the Rev. Mr. Thurston and twelve charter members, this was the first congregation organized on the east side of Wichita Falls, meeting in members' homes until it could raise a building. Two of its early structures were destroyed by dynamite, yet the community held together, relocating and rebuilding through the early 20th century. Under long pastorates it grew into a pillar of the city's African American community, producing pastors and sustaining Christian education and missionary work.

Athens, TX

Mt. Providence Baptist Church took shape in 1888, its earliest congregants worshipping in borrowed churches, homes, and brush arbors before trustees bought land in 1890. Its classrooms did double duty for pupils of the Blackshear School, and baptisms were held in a pool near the old Harbison-Walker brickyard. After World War II the congregation bought a surplus military barracks from Camp Fannin and hauled it in as their new sanctuary, later bricking it over and adding an indoor baptismal pool. The church remains a hub of community aid in Athens.

Port Lavaca, TX

Organized at the port of Indianola in 1870, this is one of the oldest Black congregations in Calhoun County, first led by the Rev. Joseph Whitlock. Two devastating hurricanes—in 1875 and 1886—drove the members from ruined Indianola to Port Lavaca, where they carried their church with them. Known first as Second Baptist, it took the name Mt. Sinai in 1905 during the long pastorate of the Rev. A. K. Black.

Frydek, TX

Organized in 1866 as the Bethlehem Baptist Church by Joe and Abe Osborne and Louis Thompson, this congregation took root in the first year of freedom after the Civil War. Reorganized as Mt. Zion Baptist in the 1880s, its members worshipped in homes and then a log sanctuary, rebuilding faithfully after both a fire and a major storm leveled their church. More than a century and a half on, it still serves as a spiritual anchor for the Frydek community.

Fort Worth, TX

On Christmas Day 1894, evangelist the Rev. Frank Tribune gathered five founding members—four of them women—to organize Mt. Zion Baptist Church, aided by the prominent Black Baptist leader the Rev. Dr. A. R. Griggs. The congregation worshipped in a 1907 frame building, then a tabernacle, before raising this brick sanctuary beginning in 1919 and adding an education building in the mid-20th century.

Ben Wheeler vicinity, TX

In 1874, families from four small communities gathered on Ephraim and Malinda Curtis's farm to organize Mt. Zion Church, offering spiritual and material support through the hard, uncertain years of Reconstruction after the Civil War. The Curtises deeded land for a sanctuary in 1877, and as the congregation outgrew each building it moved and expanded, reaching a third sanctuary in 1990. A Colored Methodist Episcopal congregation, it sent a number of its members into the ministry.

Houston, TX

Organized in 1866 — the year after the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished in Texas — Mt. Zion was one of Houston's first three African American churches, its congregation meeting at first in a tent on Commerce Street. That same fall the Freedmen's Bureau opened a school on the church's property, one of the earliest in the city for formerly enslaved children and adults, and the congregation kept teaching there into the 1880s. Through fires, a devastating norther, and the great hurricane of 1900, the church rebuilt again and again, helping to found many other congregations along the way.

Robstown, TX

Shortly after Riley and Ella Mays brought their twelve children to Robstown in 1917, they and the Ira Collier family gathered neighbors to found Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church, holding its first service in a schoolhouse in 1918. Regional Baptist leaders supplied early pastors before the congregation called the Rev. C. B. Baycoat, and the church raised its first sanctuary in 1930 and a full-time ministry by 1950. Later decades brought new buildings and the purchase of the Phyllis Wheatley School as a community activity center.

Brenham, TX

After emancipation in 1865, African American families settled the west side of Brenham in a community called Watersville, where Reverend J.R. Smith held brush-arbor services in 1877 that grew into Mt. Zion. The congregation bought this site and built its church in 1878, rebuilding after damaging winds in 1926 and dedicating a new fellowship hall in 1984. Standing on what is now called Heritage Corner, the church entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1990.