African American History

Americus, GA

Opened in 1923 and funded largely by Dr. W.S. Prather, the Americus Colored Hospital was one of the earliest hospitals in southwest Georgia devoted to the care of African Americans. In an era when segregation barred Black physicians, nurses, and pharmacists from most Southern hospitals, it opened its practice to doctors of all races. Despite chronic financial troubles it served the community until Sumter Regional Hospital was built under the Hill-Burton Act in 1953.

Tomball, TX

The Amos family arrived in Texas before the Civil War, and in 1881 Thomas Amos and his son-in-law bought land in what became Kohrville, a self-sufficient African American community. As the family prospered they helped found a school and a Baptist church, and Amos set aside ground for this cemetery. Its graves include World War I veterans, teachers, pastors, and Freemasons—pillars of a community that descendants still work to preserve.

San Augustine, TX

Founded as the Bethel Presbyterian Church at the Goodlaw School House by the Reverend Hugh Wilson on June 2, 1838, this early Republic-era congregation drew together settler families of San Augustine. Its charter roll named more than two dozen members, including the enslaved couple Jack and Hanna Sharp, recorded among the founders.

Laneville vicinity, TX

In 1868 formerly enslaved people from the Devereaux plantation founded the community of Anadarko and the Anadarko Christian Church, which hosted the area's first Black public school. With $900 from Julius Rosenwald's fund, plus public and family donations, a three-teacher Rosenwald School was built here in 1926, later renamed for principal U. E. Allen. Only the gymnasium's pier-and-beam foundation now remains of the school that served the community until integration.

Houston, TX

After the Civil War, African Americans in Houston were routinely denied insurance and loans, so in 1882 Jamaican immigrant and educator Henry Cohen Hardy founded the Ancient Order of Pilgrims to provide burial insurance and real estate credit to the city's Black population. The fraternal order spread through local chapters called sanctuaries, and by 1926 built the four-story Pilgrim Temple, a triangular brick landmark that also housed the Negro Chamber of Commerce, the Houston Defender newspaper, beauty and drug businesses, and a ballroom used by Black clubs and schools. For four decades the temple was a hub of Black Houston's civic and economic life before the order faded and the building was razed.

Anderson, TX

Organized in 1844, Anderson Baptist Church hosted the 1848 gathering that formed the Baptist General Convention of Texas, drawing representatives from most of the state's few Baptist churches. Its rock sanctuary, built by enslaved laborers and finished in 1855, still stands—restored after a 1955 fire using the original walls—and in 1858 the church cradled the first Baptist Woman's Missionary Society in Texas.

Dallas, TX

Anderson Bonner was born enslaved in Alabama around 1839 and brought to Texas as a young man in the 1850s. After emancipation he built a livelihood by tending livestock, farming, and selling cotton and corn, and in 1874 he and his brother bought land along White Rock Creek in what became North Dallas. Though he never learned to read or write, Bonner shrewdly leased land and equipment and steadily acquired acreage across Dallas, Richardson, and Farmers Branch, renting to Black families and anchoring a supportive community.

Calvert, TX

Born in Calvert in 1879, Andrew "Rube" Foster rose from pitching for the Waco Yellow Jackets to become the dominant hurler of Black baseball, famed for his fastball and screwball. As a player-manager he built dynasties like the Chicago American Giants, and in 1920 he gathered eight club owners in Kansas City to found the Negro National League—the first lasting African American professional circuit—serving as its president. Honored as the "Father of Black Baseball," he was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981.

Dare County, NC

The Reverend Andrew Cartwright planted his first African Methodist Episcopal Zion church near here in 1865, as freedom came to the Albemarle region at the close of the Civil War. A tireless organizer, he built up A.M.E. Zion congregations across the area before serving as an agent of the American Colonization Society in Liberia. His life bridged emancipation at home and the movement to build Black institutions across the Atlantic.

Felicity, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, the Ohio River was the great dividing line between slaveholding Kentucky and free-soil Ohio, and the moment a freedom seeker stepped onto the northern bank the most dangerous leg of the journey began. Felicity, a small Clermont County village a few miles inland, sat squarely on that escape corridor, and Andrew Powell turned his own prosperity into a tool of resistance. Rather than hide his passengers, he moved them in plain sight, using his distinctive and well-recognized private carriage as cover to carry fugitives inland from the river toward the next link in the network. It was a quietly audacious gamble that a respectable man's conspicuous coach would draw less suspicion than a covered wagon on a back road.

New Bern, NC

Established in 1802 to serve all local Methodists, Andrew's Chapel became a spiritual crossroads in New Bern. After 1864 it served as a mother church for the A.M.E. Zion faith, and in 1879 it was reorganized as St. Peter's. Its story traces the emergence of independent Black congregations in the wake of emancipation.

Angleton, TX

In 1892 two residents donated a town block for schools, and citizens raised two hundred dollars for a frame building that doubled as Angleton's meeting house. The district incorporated in 1897, and its brick schools were twice destroyed by the great coastal storms of 1900 and 1909, each time rebuilt larger. Angleton touted its schools to attract settlers and repeatedly enlarged the district; separate schools for African American and Hispanic students operated until integration was achieved in the 1960s.

London Grove Township, PA · est. 2008

Born on this Chester County land in 1813, Ann Preston broke barrier after barrier in a world that barred women from medicine. A graduate of the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, she became its dean in 1865 — the first American woman to hold such a post — and in 1860 founded the Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia, later adding one of the nation's earliest nurses' training schools. A Quaker, she was also an abolitionist tied to the Underground Railroad.

Edgecombe County, NC

In 1908 Anna Easter Brown helped found Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first Greek-letter sorority established by and for African American women, born at Howard University as Black students built their own institutions of leadership and service. A history teacher by profession, Brown embodied the era's belief that education and organization were paths to uplift. Her grave lies a quarter mile east.

Raleigh, NC

Born in 1858, Anna J. Cooper rose from the Reconstruction-era South to become a renowned educator, orator, and early Black feminist. A graduate of St. Augustine's in Raleigh, she published A Voice from the South in 1892, a landmark of Black feminist thought that argued the progress of the race depended on the education of its women. She lived to 1964, her grave now resting blocks from here.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2019

Anna Thomas Jeanes was a Philadelphia Quaker who used her wealth to answer some of her era's hardest problems. Her bequest founded the institutions that became Jeanes Hospital and Fox Chase Cancer Center, while her Jeanes Foundation — the Negro Rural School Fund — poured money into education for Black children in the segregated South. She named Booker T. Washington a trustee, and the fund trained the traveling Black teachers known as Jeanes Supervisors.

Dayton, TX

By 1883 Liberty County ran 53 schools, 19 of them for African American children, though the school year was often just three months long. In the late 1890s the district hired its first Black teacher, Annie Fairchild Colbert, a Tillotson Institute graduate who — barred from teaching in Houston as a married woman — came to Dayton and, with her students, built an improved one-room schoolhouse by hand. She taught the community's children until 1918, and in 1934 a new four-room Rosenwald School was dedicated in her honor.

Madison, GA

As cotton plantations spread across Morgan County in the early 1800s, the town of Madison became a social and commercial hub where planters shopped, worshipped, and built fashionable in-town residences. Their grand Greek Revival homes advertised both new wealth and the stark reality of a slave-based plantation economy that had displaced the region's earlier yeoman farmers. Landmarks like the Johnston-Jones-Manley House—later preserved as the house museum Heritage Hall—still trace that antebellum transformation.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2016

In the crowded streets of colonial Philadelphia, a mild-mannered Quaker schoolteacher named Anthony Benezet quietly became one of the most influential abolitionists of his age. From this home he taught free and enslaved Black children in the 1750s and 60s, and in 1754 opened one of the era's earliest schools for girls—radical acts in a city where slavery was still ordinary. His tracts against the slave trade crossed the Atlantic, shaping antislavery thinkers in Britain and America alike.

Henderson, TX

In 1866, barely a year after emancipation, freedpersons in Rusk County organized Antioch Baptist Church and gathered a community around it. The congregation went on to plant five more churches and to sustain a school, whose one-room building was rebuilt in the early 1920s with help from the Rosenwald Fund before integration closed it in 1966. Church, school, and cemetery together made Antioch a lasting freedmen's settlement.

Malakoff, TX

On a two-acre tract bought in 1883 by the trustees of the New Hope Methodist Episcopal Church, this cemetery has long served the Black farming community of Antioch. Its earliest marked grave, that of Allen Delorah, dates to 1894, and the ground holds numerous unmarked graves of early settlers and ministers. It stands as one of the oldest graveyards in this part of Henderson County.

Lovelady, TX

Begun in the era of a vanished village first known as Neville's Prairie, this East Texas burial ground took the name Antioch in 1890 when a new post office rechristened the settlement. Its more than a thousand graves hold both enslaved people and pioneer settlers, a record in stone of a community that had faded away by the 1930s. The oldest documented burial dates to 1870.

Midway, TX

Antioch Church of Christ traces its roots to a congregation formed on the Hayes Plantation and named for the biblical city of Antioch, making it among the oldest independent Black churches in Texas. After emancipation the church moved to Midway in 1865, where its building doubled as a school until a dedicated schoolhouse—later a Rosenwald School—was built. Through mergers and rebuildings across the twentieth century, the congregation has remained an active center of worship and outreach.

Buda, TX

Antioch Colony was a farming community formed after the Civil War by formerly enslaved African Americans who found it hard to buy land in freedom. Beginning in 1870, Anglo businessman Joseph Rowley sold parcels along Onion Creek to former slaves, sometimes writing restrictions into the deeds that may have been meant to protect the new owners from losing their property. Residents Elias and Clarisa Bunton donated land for a school and church in 1874, and the colony sustained Baptist and Methodist churches, a Masonic lodge, and an Eastern Star chapter until families drifted away by the 1950s; descendants have since returned to reclaim ancestral land.

Grand Prairie, TX

Mose Jordan Sr. arrived in the Grand Prairie area as an enslaved man in 1852, and by the late 1850s part of the Jordan plantation was already a burial ground for the enslaved. After the Civil War the Jordans freed their remaining slaves and divided fifty acres among them, and Mose helped found Freetown—also called 'The Line'—a Black community later displaced by Mountain Creek Lake. The plantation and Antioch cemeteries merged over time into this resting place for the earliest members of the Freetown and Dalworth communities.

Houston, TX

When federal troops proclaimed emancipation at Galveston on June 19, 1865, freedom came at last to enslaved Texans — and within a year, nine formerly enslaved people organized what became Houston's first African American Baptist church. Under the Rev. John Henry Yates, elected first full-time pastor in 1868, the congregation championed Black education and helped found the Houston Baptist Academy in 1885. The Gothic Revival sanctuary rising here in 1875–79 grew over decades into a landmark of stained glass, cross gables, and a glowing neon sign proclaiming that Jesus saves.

Palestine, TX

This congregation grew from informal home services held in Palestine as early as 1856 and was formally organized as Antioch Baptist Church in 1873, once known as "Antioch Under the Hill." It built its first sanctuary that year on land deeded by John H. Reagan and steadily expanded through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, weathering a devastating 1962 fire before rebuilding. For generations Antioch has anchored Palestine's African American community with worship, education, and family programs.

La Vernia, TX

The Applewhite line reached Texas through Thomas Applewhite, a North Carolina–born War of 1812 sergeant who, with his wife Elizabeth and eight enslaved people, moved to Wilson County in 1853 and bought 214 acres here the next year. Local tradition holds the homestead served briefly as a stage stop on an alternate branch of the Chihuahua Road running from the coast to San Antonio. After emancipation, African American families who had taken the Applewhite name established their own homes nearby and remained in the area for generations, their story bound up with the land's original stone house, largely destroyed by 1950s highway work.

Ames, IA

This building honors Archie A. and Nancy C. Martin, remembered in Ames as pioneers whose belief in education and diversity was, in a mayor's words, ahead of its time. The Martins are celebrated for opening their home to Black students who were barred from campus housing, making their household a haven during the era of segregated college life in the Midwest.

New Boston, TX

The Black community of Arkadelphia took root after the Civil War as freedpeople built a life in this rural stretch of Bowie County. In the 1920s residents joined the Rosenwald Fund program—Julius Rosenwald's partnership with Booker T. Washington—that helped African American communities across the South build schools, but only if they matched the grant with their own cash, materials, and labor. Families cut and hauled timber and raised the schoolhouse themselves, and it grew from three rooms into a hub that served students through the 12th grade until desegregation and consolidation closed it, after which it lived on as a community center until its demolition around 1993.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2007

Art Blakey grew up in Pittsburgh's vibrant Hill District, a cradle of jazz talent, and got his start with Billy Eckstine's pioneering band. A founder of the driving, blues-soaked style known as hard bop, Blakey led the Jazz Messengers for decades and turned the group into a legendary finishing school for young talent, launching the likes of Freddie Hubbard, Horace Silver, and Wynton Marsalis. His lifetime of achievement was crowned with a Grammy in 2005.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2011

Arthur Lee Hall was a Philadelphia dancer and choreographer who wove African dance, drumming, and cultural tradition into the fabric of American modern dance. From the Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center, which was both his home and his studio, he trained performers and staged productions that broadened what modern dance could be. His work carried the rhythms and spirit of the African diaspora onto the American stage.

Houston, TX

In 1866, freedman William Burley came to Harrisburg to minister to newly emancipated African Americans, buying land along Brays Bayou for a home and a church that became the Methodist Episcopal Church of Harrisburg. The Freedmen's Bureau sponsored a community school on the grounds until 1870, an early Black public school for the area, and the congregation grew into a focal point of Black community life. Through renamings that reflected its history, it became Asbury Memorial United Methodist Church, and its members included Civil War veteran Wilson Burley of the 84th U.S. Colored Infantry and Tom Blue, once enslaved by Sam Houston.

Frost, TX

Founded in 1899 in the historically African-American community of Pelham, this school first met in the local Methodist chapel before a two-story schoolhouse rose near the cemetery in 1908. Uncommon for a rural Black school of its era, it taught all twelve grades, sending graduates on to college. In 1921 its trustees drew on the Chicago-based Rosenwald Foundation—Julius Rosenwald's landmark partnership with Southern Black communities—to build a larger school, which served until consolidation in the 1960s.

McIntosh County, GA

Built around 1820, Ashantilly was the mainland home of Thomas Spalding (1774–1851), a prominent antebellum planter whose principal estate lay on nearby Sapelo Island. Likely constructed by Spalding's enslaved workers, the house was made of tabby—a coastal building material of oyster shell, sand, lime, and water—and named for his family's ancestral home in Scotland. In the 20th century it became the home of the Ashantilly Press before being donated as a cultural center in 1993.

Blessing, TX

After riding with Terry's Texas Rangers in the Civil War, New Jersey native William Erastus Moore settled northeast of Blessing and named the farming community for Colonel Henry M. Ashby, a Tennessee commander he had served under. Moore ran a ranch, store, and post office and donated land for the Ashby Methodist Church. Nearby, freed slaves founded the Wilson Creek Community, organizing their own Baptist church and school, until cleared river channels and wartime out-migration slowly emptied the combined settlement.

Athens, GA

Established in 1916–1917 and accredited in 1922, Athens High and Industrial School was Georgia's first four-year public high school for African-American students, growing out of the earlier Reese Street School. It offered a rigorous curriculum—Latin, Greek, literature, chemistry, physics—alongside evening industrial classes for adults, under longtime principal Samuel F. Harris. In 1933 it moved to the former site of the Knox Institute, founded by the Freedmen's Bureau in 1868.

Atlanta, TX

Public education in Atlanta, Texas dates to 1874, and for generations separate schools served Anglo and African American children. This building rose in 1936 as a school for white students, funded by the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, and grew with additions as enrollment climbed. Integrated in 1970 and closed as a school in 1974, it was later saved from demolition by concerned citizens who bought it in 2001.

Beaumont, TX

Born in tiny Corrigan in 1909, Aubrey Wilson "Moon" Mullican became one of country music's great innovators — the self-styled "King of the Hillbilly Piano Players." His hard-driving, two-finger piano style drew deeply on the music of the African-American farm workers and sharecroppers he grew up among, and he carried it from Houston bars to the Grand Ole Opry and stages across the U.S., Europe, and Vietnam. Inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1974, his epitaph reads, "I'll sail my ship alone."

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2007

On this spot in Pittsburgh's Hill District was born August Wilson, one of the towering American playwrights of the 20th century. He got his start co-founding the Black Horizon Theater before writing his monumental "American Century Cycle"—ten plays, one for each decade of the 1900s—most set among the working people of the very neighborhood that raised him. Two of them, "Fences" and "The Piano Lesson," earned Pulitzer Prizes, and "Fences" took a Tony as well.

Moscow, TX

This double-log house, built in 1859 by Augustus Darby in the East Texas piney woods of Polk County, was raised by enslaved labor: for six months, twenty-five enslaved people drew and straightened square nails from old lumber and hand-sawed the rough cypress that sealed the pegged structure. The inscription's plain accounting of that work is a stark window into how antebellum Texas homes were built on the eve of the Civil War. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Franklin Township, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, the hill country of Clermont County sat on the Ohio River frontier directly across from slaveholding Kentucky, making it a crossroads of the antislavery cause and a corridor for freedom-seekers moving north. This parcel once held the home of Arthur Fee (1791–1879), remembered here as part of a family that earned a reputation for abolitionist conviction in an era when opposing slavery could mean social scorn and real personal risk. A marker on a former house site like this one preserves the memory of ordinary households that turned private principle into public stand.

Galveston, TX

This Galveston congregation traces its roots to the enslaved members of the city's First Baptist Church in the 1840s, who by the early 1850s worshiped separately as the African Baptist Church. After the Civil War the property was deeded to the congregation, which reorganized under Black leadership and later took the name Avenue L Missionary Baptist Church. Its pastors went on to lead district associations, a national convention, and a college, making the church a pillar of Black religious and civic life.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1968

Founded in 1849 by Charles Avery—a Methodist lay preacher, businessman, and committed abolitionist—Avery College offered a classical education to African Americans at a time when such opportunity was almost universally denied them. Located on Pittsburgh's North Side, it became an important institution for Black advancement and a center of antislavery sympathy in the decades before the Civil War. Avery devoted much of his fortune to the education and uplift of the people the nation still held in bondage.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2000

From its opening in 1887 until 1938, Baker Bowl was the home of the Philadelphia Phillies, and after a rebuilding in 1895 it was praised as the finest ballpark in the country. Its grandstands witnessed a remarkable run of firsts and lasts — the first World Series game attended by a U.S. president in 1915, the Negro League World Series of 1924–26, and Babe Ruth's final major league game in 1935. Razed in 1950, the park lives on only in memory and this marker.

Fort Worth, TX

After working as a Pullman porter for the Santa Fe Railroad, James Nathan Baker, Sr. opened a funeral home for Cleburne's African American community in 1917 and became a licensed embalmer in 1922. Moving to Fort Worth in 1926, he built the Baker Undertaking Company into a regional enterprise that added a community ambulance service, a burial association, and a cemetery, serving Black families across the area. Passed down through four generations, the business remains a landmark tied to Fort Worth's historic Black churches, leaders, and neighborhoods.

Alvarado, TX

This burial ground was established in 1856 beside the Balch Cemetery to serve Alvarado's African American community, its first grave that of an enslaved girl killed by a black bear. Over the decades it received victims of smallpox, diphtheria, and other epidemics, many of them children, and in 1911 undertaker A. J. Senter donated land that gave the renamed Senterwood Cemetery its name. Those laid to rest here include business owners, church leaders, and veterans of the World Wars and Vietnam.

Macon, GA

Opened in 1949, Ballard-Hudson was for decades the only high school in Macon serving African American students in grades nine through twelve. It joined two lineages: Ballard High, descended from the Lewis High School founded by the American Missionary Association in 1868, and the public, industrial Hudson High. Reorganized in 1970 as Georgia's public schools were finally integrated by federal order, the school counts among its graduates the soul giant Otis Redding and rock-and-roll pioneer Little Richard.

Bandera, TX

The Bandera Cemetery has held the town's dead since the 1850s, its oldest grave dating to 1851, before Bandera itself was fully established. Among those buried are community leaders, fraternal-order members, and veterans reaching back to the Mexican-American War. The land traces to Hendrick Arnold, a free African American who scouted and spied for the Texas Revolution alongside his father-in-law, the famed Erastus "Deaf" Smith, and a group of seven women organized the cemetery association in 1907.

Falls Church, VA

In 1791, surveyors set out to mark the boundaries of the new federal district that would become Washington, D.C., placing stones at one-mile intervals around its diamond-shaped perimeter. Benjamin Banneker — a free African American astronomer, mathematician, and almanac author — assisted Andrew Ellicott in the survey, making the precise celestial observations that anchored the work. This stone, SW-9, is one of the surviving original boundary markers, and its association with Banneker earned it National Historic Landmark designation in 1980.

Chicago, IL

On this Chicago spot, a young Barack Obama shared a first kiss with Michelle Robinson after a date that ended with Baskin-Robbins ice cream and a seat on the curb. Years later, as President, he recalled the moment fondly, and it was memorialized where their courtship began. The site marks the private beginning of a partnership that reached the White House.

Houston, TX

Barbara Charline Jordan, born in Houston in 1936, rose through oratory contests at Wheatley High and Texas Southern to Boston University Law School. In 1966 she became the first African American woman elected to the Texas Senate, later its first Black president pro tempore, and then won a seat in Congress — where her eloquence during the 1974 Watergate hearings made her a national figure before she turned to teaching in Austin.

Concord, NC

Founded in 1867 by the Rev. Luke Dorland under Presbyterian auspices, Scotia Seminary set out to educate Black women in the wake of emancipation. In 1930 it merged with the Barber Memorial Institute to form Barber-Scotia College, and it opened to men in 1954. For generations it trained teachers and leaders across the segregated South.

Refugio, TX

Barred from schooling under slavery, Refugio's African American community built its own after emancipation, first in a rented shotgun house where students hauled their own water and cut firewood to heat the room. After fire destroyed an early school in 1927, classes met in a dance hall and a church until a two-room stucco building rose in 1929 through the Rosenwald program, which matched local funds for Black schools across the South. The school was later named for A.T. Barefield, an educator here from 1902 to 1949.

Athens, TX

Hester and Armstead Barker were formerly enslaved people who struggled to buy the very land they had once worked for others. When Hester died in 1893, Armstead set aside four acres as a cemetery for the Gum Creek community and its descendants. Through hard times—including a forced Depression-era sale that concerned neighbors reversed by forming an association in 1933—the burial ground endured, growing to more than 300 graves and remaining in use today.

Kerrville, TX

Barnett Chapel is the oldest African American church in Kerr County, tracing to 1896 when Jim and Josephine Barnett helped organize Kerrville's first religious services for Black residents. Named in the couple's honor, the congregation secured its lasting home in 1898 and was served by circuit-riding ministers from surrounding towns until the Rev. W.M. Mosby became its first full-time pastor in 1902. Through worship, outreach, youth work, and Juneteenth celebrations it has remained a pillar of the community.

Baldwin County, AL

On April 9, 1865 — the very day Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox in Virginia — Union forces stormed the Confederate earthworks at Blakely, near Mobile, in one of the last full-scale battles of the Civil War. Thousands of Federal troops, including several regiments of United States Colored Troops, overran the fortifications guarding the eastern approach to Mobile Bay, effectively sealing the fate of the last major Gulf port still in Confederate hands. Word of the war's end had not yet reached the men who fought and died here.

West Chester, PA · est. 1995

Bayard Rustin was born in West Chester in 1912 and grew into one of the most brilliant strategists of the American civil rights movement. A lifelong pacifist schooled in nonviolence, he was the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the massive demonstration where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. He later led the A. Philip Randolph Institute, linking the causes of civil rights and organized labor. Often pushed to the movement's margins because he was openly gay, Rustin worked tirelessly behind the scenes.

Cushing, TX

In 1839, soon after moving his family from Tennessee, Martin Baysinger received a 640-acre land grant in what became Rusk County and built up a plantation with a grist mill, cotton gin, brick pit, syrup mill, store, and post office. His holdings eventually approached 7,000 acres, and he set aside this small burial ground at the death of his first wife in 1870. A wooden grave house and the markers of enslaved people said to be buried nearby are now gone, leaving graves that record the county's pioneer era.

Irving, TX

Settled in the 1850s within the old Robertson's Colony, this stretch of North Texas prairie became something new after the Civil War, when freedmen moved in and reunited families that slavery had torn apart. Jim Green, the first Black landowner here, bought his acreage in 1878, and neighbors soon followed, organizing the Shady Grove Christian Methodist Episcopal Church and a Freedom School on land Green donated. For generations the Bear Creek community farmed, worshipped, and taught its children here, until the sprawl of the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex and its airport all but erased the settlement.