African American History

Mingus, TX

The Whitehead Cemetery recalls the African American community that lived in the company town of Thurber in the early 20th century. When the Texas and Pacific Coal and Oil Company moved its offices to Fort Worth in 1933, several Black families stayed on in their company-owned homes. Albert Whitehead and fellow residents established this burial plot south of the old town square as a convenient alternative to the Thurber Cemetery, with the first documented burial—Sarah Grant—in 1943. Tarleton State University now maintains it as part of its industrial-history center grounds.

Brenham, TX

This burial ground is the resting place of Godfrey Whiting and Martha Richardson, both born into slavery early in the 19th century and held by Georgia planter Daniel Long Richardson, who brought his enslaved people to Texas. After emancipation, part of the Richardson land passed to Godfrey Whiting, and in 1872 he and Martha bought neighboring acreage to build a homestead. Family tradition holds that the cemetery sits on the site of their old slave cabin, where Godfrey was first buried in 1897 and Martha beside him in 1922.

Kildare, TX

This African American cemetery began as a six-acre burial ground on the sprawling plantation of Willis Whitaker, a South Carolinian who reached Texas in 1840 with his family and more than fifty enslaved people. Those laid to rest here were the enslaved, freed people, and their descendants—among the earliest perhaps seven Freemen killed on the plantation in 1868, and many lost to the malaria epidemic of 1896 and later storms. With more than 350 documented burials, including educators, businessmen, and veterans, the cemetery remains in use today.

Coatesville, PA · est. 2007

A 1924 Howard University graduate, Dr. Whittier C. Atkinson opened his practice in Coatesville in 1927 and in 1936 founded the Clement Atkinson Memorial Hospital, offering care to everyone regardless of their ability to pay. He broke barriers as the first African American president of the Chester County Medical Society and was named Pennsylvania Practitioner of the Year in 1960. His hospital stood as a rare place of open access in an era of segregated medicine.

Franklin Township, OH

Built in 1800–01 by Revolutionary War veteran Peter Wickerham, this sturdy inn stood as a stagecoach stop on Zane's Trace, the pioneering road that opened the Ohio country. Over the decades it sheltered a remarkable range of travelers, from freedom seekers escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad to Confederate cavalry under Gen. John Hunt Morgan, who lodged here during his daring 1863 raid across Ohio.

Marshall, TX

Established in 1873 by the Freedmen's Aid Society of the Methodist Church, Wiley College opened its doors to Black men and women freed by the Civil War, one of the earliest such institutions west of the Mississippi. Named for Bishop Isaac W. Wiley, the school moved to Marshall in 1878 and graduated its first college student, Henry B. Pemberton, in 1888; in 1893 the Rev. Isaiah Scott, a former slave preacher, became its first Black president. Under Dr. Matthew W. Dogan's 46-year tenure, Wiley earned a top rating and pioneered the influential combined academic-technical curriculum known as the "Wiley Method," widely copied among Black colleges.

Marshall, TX

The Methodist Episcopal Church's Freedmen's Aid Society founded Wiley College in Marshall in 1873 to educate former slaves and their descendants, and set aside four acres of its grounds as a burial place for the Black community. The earliest documented graves date to 1894, and those laid to rest include longtime college president Matthew Dogan, respected teachers, and veterans of the Civil War through the Korean War. Many graves remain unmarked, and a cemetery club has tended the grounds since 1959.

Felicity, OH

Felicity sits in Clermont County in southwestern Ohio, only a short distance from the Ohio River — the line that separated the free state of Ohio from slaveholding Kentucky. In the tense decades before the Civil War, this borderland became a frontline of the Underground Railroad, where freedom seekers who crossed the river depended on a hidden network of conductors and safe houses to guide them northward. Will Sleet's home stood as one node in that clandestine web, and the fact that his role is remembered here points to the courage such work demanded in a community close enough to slavery's reach to make sheltering the escaping dangerous.

Glasgow, KY

A Glasgow native, Willa Brown Chappell became the first African American woman to earn a U.S. pilot's license in 1937 and, within a few years, the first American woman to hold both mechanic's and commercial pilot's licenses. She co-founded the Coffey School of Aeronautics, which trained Black pilots—some of whom joined the Tuskegee Airmen—and the National Airmen's Association, which pressed to open the Air Force to African Americans. As the first Black officer in the Civil Air Patrol, she became a leading voice for integrating the U.S. military.

New York, NY

Two towering American authors worked within these walls a generation apart. Here in 1912 Willa Cather, later famed for My Antonia, wrote her first novel, Alexander's Bridge. And here in 1945 Richard Wright, author of the searing Native Son, wrote his autobiography, Black Boy. The address quietly joins the prairie realism of one writer to the unflinching testimony of another.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1995

Billy Strayhorn grew up in Pittsburgh's Homewood neighborhood and honed his gifts at Westinghouse High School before becoming one of the great composers and arrangers in American jazz. His decades-long partnership with Duke Ellington produced some of the era's most enduring music, and his composition "Take the A Train" became the Ellington orchestra's signature theme. A classically trained musician with a sophisticated ear, Strayhorn shaped the sound of the Ellington band from behind the scenes.

Nacogdoches, TX

Born enslaved in South Carolina in 1794, William "Bill" Goyens escaped to Texas in 1821 and built a life of wealth and standing as a free Black man on the East Texas frontier. He aided the Army of Texas during the 1836 revolution and served as interpreter for the Houston-Forbes Treaty with the Cherokees that same year, earning a reputation for generosity before his death at Goyens' Hill in 1856.

York, PA · est. 1987

Born into slavery in 1805, William C. Goodridge built a remarkable life of enterprise in antebellum York. Tanner, barber, and newspaper distributor, he prospered enough to raise York's first five-story building and to run a small fleet of rail cars. Those same cars did quieter, riskier work: carrying freedom seekers northward along the Underground Railroad.

Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 2004

A prosperous Wilkes-Barre merchant, William Camp Gildersleeve turned his home and business into a refuge for freedom seekers, making him a central figure in the Underground Railroad of the Wyoming Valley. In 1853 he testified in a widely reported federal case arising from the shooting of a fugitive named William Thomas by deputy marshals—testimony that drew national notice, especially in African American newspapers. His public stand came amid the fierce national conflict over the Fugitive Slave Act.

Salisbury Township, PA · est. 2006

When William Chester Ruth opened his blacksmith and machine shop here in 1923, he served the Pennsylvania German farmers of Lancaster County with skilled metalwork and repairs. A self-taught African American inventor, he patented numerous agricultural devices, most famously a 1928 baler feeder, and later turned his ingenuity toward military equipment. Beyond the forge, he was a respected spiritual leader in his community.

Charlotte, NC

In the summer of 1898, the Spanish-American War carried American soldiers to the hills outside Santiago de Cuba, where the fighting on July 1 around San Juan Heights became the war's defining land battle. William Ewen Shipp, a North Carolina–born West Point graduate serving as a first lieutenant with the 10th Cavalry—one of the celebrated regiments of Black 'Buffalo Soldiers' led by white officers—was killed that day as his men pressed the assault. This monument in his home city of Charlotte gathers his short life into a single elegant image, calling him 'the very straightest plant' amongst a grove.

Palestine, TX

Born into slavery in 1863 to Charlotte Freeman, a plantation maid, William Freeman gained his freedom as a toddler and went on to study at Prairie View, training as both a teacher and a brick mason. He helped rename Palestine's Colored School for Frederick Douglass in 1898 and served as principal of Douglass Elementary from 1901 to 1909, even as he made and laid bricks for many of the town's buildings. His son and grandson followed him as principals of the school for forty-six years.

San Augustine, TX

William Garrett (1808–84) bought this San Augustine County land soon after coming to Texas in 1830 and in 1861 raised a two-story house from pine milled at his own nearby sawmill. Built by enslaved laborers, the home featured unusual free-standing columns and carved mantels over its six fireplaces, and it often sheltered travelers on the Old San Antonio Road. The property passed to the Parker family in 1904.

Geneva, TX

On land once part of a 1794 Spanish grant, formerly enslaved William Gasby bought acreage in 1870 and donated four acres for a burial ground serving the neighboring Black community. The oldest marked grave dates to 1889, but rock-marked sites suggest earlier use. A blacksmith, cotton gin operator, and community leader, Gasby lies here with his family, alongside figures like the Reverend Alfred Canton, who helped found a Missionary Baptist church in 1868.

Greensburg, KY

Greensburg was the 1818 birthplace of William H. Herndon, though the world would remember him from Illinois, where his family soon moved. An outspoken opponent of slavery, Herndon became Abraham Lincoln's law partner from 1844 until Lincoln left for the White House, and he served as mayor of Springfield. After the assassination he devoted himself to preserving his friend's memory, publishing a candid, influential biography in 1889.

Terrell, TX

Born in 1872, William Henry Burnett was a promising Black farm boy in the South Prong community of Ellis County when Presbyterian missionary Alexander R. Wilson took him under his wing, guiding him to an education and a scholarship at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Trained as a teacher, Burnett returned to Texas and in 1900 became principal of Terrell's Black school, where over 44 years he launched its first high school program and organized a school band. A leading educator and civic figure, he had a school named in his honor in 1979.

Swatara Township, PA · est. 1997

Born free in New York, the man honored here devoted his life to the fight against slavery, lecturing across the United States, Canada, and Britain on behalf of the enslaved and free Black communities. After the Civil War he settled in Harrisburg, edited a newspaper, and served as a leader in the A.M.E. Zion Church. In 1878 he broke a barrier by becoming the first African American elected to the city's school board, later serving as its president.

Texas City, TX

A Virginia-born prodigy licensed to practice law at nineteen, William Jefferson Jones came to Texas in 1837 at the urging of Mirabeau B. Lamar and served as an associate justice on the Republic's first Supreme Court. He joined Lamar's 1839 campaign to expel the Cherokee from East Texas, later pioneered sea-island cotton and cottonseed oil on the mainland, and drew up early plans for a deep-water port at Virginia Point. His generous land terms helped seed La Marque's African American Highland Station community after the Civil War.

Egypt, TX

William Jones Elliot Heard came to Mexican Texas on one of Stephen F. Austin's land grants and settled in 1832 on rich bottomland his neighbors dubbed "Egypt" for its biblical fertility. He commanded a company at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, then built a cotton gin, ran cattle, and raised the crops of a working plantation, later serving as chief justice of Wharton County. The brick home he built in 1849-54 sheltered six generations of his family.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2013

William Lewis was a Philadelphia lawyer and judge whose convictions helped end slavery in his state at the dawn of the republic. He played a key role in drafting and passing Pennsylvania's 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery — the first such law in America — and spent his life defending the freedom it granted, serving as counsel for the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. His elegant summer home, Strawberry Mansion, built in 1789, still stands as a reminder of the man.

Boston, MA

This statue on Boston's Commonwealth Avenue Mall honors William Lloyd Garrison, the fiery editor who launched his antislavery newspaper The Liberator in the city in 1831 and demanded the immediate, unconditional end of American slavery. The words carved here — "My country is the world; my countrymen are mankind" — were the masthead creed of that paper, a deliberate rebuke to a nation that tolerated human bondage. Reviled and even mobbed in his own day, Garrison spent three decades insisting the enslaved were owed freedom now, not by gradual compromise. By the time he died in 1879, emancipation had vindicated the cause he had championed almost alone at its start.

Fort Worth, TX

Born in Kaufman County in 1866, William "Gooseneck Bill" McDonald entered politics in 1890 and rose to lead the "Black and Tan" faction of the Texas Republican Party, prized for his ability to unite Black and White voters. He served as a delegate to numerous state and national conventions and was a Black Masonic leader for 47 years. After moving to Fort Worth in 1906 he founded the Fraternal Bank and Trust Company and became a leading civic figure.

Forney, TX

Born in 1866 near Terrell to parents who had been enslaved, William Madison "Gooseneck Bill" McDonald rose through the segregated schools of his day with a reputation as the sharpest student in the county, graduating in 1884 and becoming principal of Forney's African American high school. He built a formidable second career in politics as a leader of the Republican "Black and Tan" faction, in business, and as grand secretary of Texas' African American Masons for nearly half a century. Moving to Fort Worth in 1906, he became one of the state's most influential Black civic leaders before his death in 1950.

Cedar County, IA

On this Cedar County ground stood the home of William Maxon, a stop on the Underground Railroad. Here in the winter before the 1859 Harpers Ferry raid, the abolitionist John Brown drilled a small band of recruits, preparing the men who would follow him east in his violent bid to end slavery.

Athens, TX

Born in South Carolina in 1805, William Richardson moved to Alabama, married Mary "Polly" Kilpatrick, and in 1855 brought his large family, his brothers' families, and the people he enslaved to Texas by wagon train, arriving at this location. He became a successful planter, registered his "Three Circles" cattle brand, and helped lay out an early road between Athens and Kaufman that Highway 175 still roughly follows. The enslaved people he brought all took the Richardson name; many stayed on after emancipation and, with their descendants, founded the nearby Sand Flat community.

Oakhurst, TX

Bill Kelley, a Virginia-born overseer who came to Texas by 1851 and served in the 25th Texas Cavalry, C.S.A., built a family and a nearly 700-acre farm with Dinah Rush, a woman born enslaved in Alabama in 1848. Because state and federal law barred their union, Dinah could never marry the father of her ten children or carry his name, yet the couple built an enduring household until her death in 1884. Their descendants went on to become leaders in business, law, medicine and education.

Dallas, TX

Born in Reconstruction-era Alabama in 1875, William Sidney Pittman rose from segregated schools to study at Tuskegee and the Drexel Institute, becoming one of the most accomplished Black architects in America. After a Washington practice and marriage to Booker T. Washington's daughter Portia, he settled in Dallas in 1913, where he designed churches, the Pythian Temple, and other buildings financed and used by the city's Black citizens. Remembered as the first practicing African American architect in Texas, he also published the newspaper Brotherhood Eyes before his death in 1958.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

From his Philadelphia home, William Still worked as a key agent of the Underground Railroad, guiding fugitives from slavery toward freedom and carefully recording their names and stories so that separated families might one day reunite. A prosperous coal merchant, he used his standing and resources to advance Black civil rights, helping found the city's first Black YMCA. His meticulous accounts, later published, remain one of the most important firsthand records of the Underground Railroad.

Savoy, TX

English-born William W. Bell emigrated to America in 1820 and reached Texas by 1836, enlisting in the Republic of Texas army in 1837 and later riding with the Texas Rangers and carrying the Republic's mail. When he died in 1845, his family buried him here, beginning a graveyard that holds his wife Elizabeth, several of their children, and—by family tradition—some enslaved people in unmarked graves. Bell descendants formed an association in 1985 to preserve the site.

Raleigh, NC

William W. Holden, a powerful newspaper editor, was appointed provisional governor of North Carolina in 1865 and elected to the office in 1868 during Reconstruction. His campaign against the Ku Klux Klan led to his impeachment and removal in 1871, the first of a U.S. governor. His home once stood on this site.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

William Whipper, born around 1804, was a founder of the American Moral Reform Society and edited its journal in 1838-39, advocating self-improvement and equality. A committed Underground Railroad agent, he used his lumber business in Columbia, Pennsylvania, to help hundreds of freedom seekers passing through between 1847 and 1860. A prosperous Black businessman, he later made his home in this city.

Liberty Hill, TX

Legend clings to the earliest years of this hilltop burial ground, where oral history places the graves of an enslaved man, an unknown Native American, and a settler family said to have been ambushed and buried in their own wagon in 1854. The oldest marked grave is that of infant Polly Williams, interred that same year on land owned by W. W. Williams. Honored veterans of both Confederate and U.S. forces lie here, along with graves relocated when Lake Georgetown was formed.

Georgetown, TX

Carved out of the young state of Texas in 1848, Williamson County took its name from Robert McAlpin Williamson — the peg-legged "Three-Legged Willie," a San Jacinto veteran and early justice of the Republic's Supreme Court. Georgetown grew as the seat of a county whose blackland and prairie soils drew a strikingly mixed population of Anglo, Czech, German, Mexican, Swedish, and — as the supplemental plaque records — a large community of African Americans, who made up nearly a fifth of residents by 1860. Early mills turned out lumber, flour, and cloth, and Southwestern University traced its charter back to the Republic itself.

Lubbock, TX

Willie Lusk Jr. started shining shoes at twelve and apprenticed under a Czech bootmaker for a dollar a day before rising to foreman over 22 bootmakers in Lubbock. When a Dallas gambler asked why such a skilled craftsman had no shop of his own, he loaned Lusk the money — a rare chance for a Black business owner in 1946. Lusk's handcrafted boots, marked by a distinctive flame stitch and wooden-pegged soles rather than any logo, were sought by actors, musicians, and cowboys worldwide.

New Kensington, PA

A New Kensington native, Willie Thrower broke a color line in 1953 when he became the first African American to play quarterback in the modern National Football League, appearing in two games for the Chicago Bears—having already been the first Black quarterback in the Big Ten as a member of Michigan State's 1952 national championship team. He first starred on the gridiron here, quarterbacking New Kensington High School to WPIAL titles from 1946 to 1948. His pro career took him to Canada before ending at just twenty-seven.

Willow Grove, TX

Willow Grove was founded in 1871 by William "Buck" Manning and A.W. Crawford, both formerly enslaved men who moved here with their families after emancipation. Each donated an acre for a Baptist church and this cemetery, where burials began in 1880. Generations of the founding families rest here, alongside veterans reaching back to World War I, and since 1935 a community association has faithfully tended the grounds.

Travis County, TX

Across the rural South and Southwest, Black communities educated their children in separate, unequal schoolhouses through the long decades of Jim Crow. A "Negro school" like this one in Travis County was often built and sustained by the very families it served, because the state provided so little to Black education. Small and plain, such buildings were nonetheless engines of literacy, faith, and community for African American families shut out of white classrooms.

Hearne, TX

Determined to give his community's African American families a foundation, John Riley Sadberry bought land in 1909 for a school and, a decade later, for a church and cemetery—all of which came to bear the name 'Wilson Chapel.' The burial ground, established in 1919, served largely the tenant farmers and sharecroppers of the surrounding Sadberry farm. His descendants formed an association in the late 1960s that still cares for the site.

Madisonville, TX

Organized in 1873 by the Rev. W. A. Parks and ten charter members, this was the second African American church in Madisonville, born in the uncertain years just after emancipation. Worship began in members' homes and a brush arbor, with sermons delivered by a lay exhorter when no minister was present, until land donated by Ed and Mary Burrell allowed a first sanctuary in 1891.

Seguin, TX

In an age when nearly every household stored food in earthen crocks and jars, pottery was serious business. A Presbyterian minister started a kiln here in 1860, but the more remarkable chapter came after 1869, when three of the men he had enslaved—James, Hiram, and Wallace Wilson—opened their own shop, H. Wilson & Co. They developed a distinctive style and ran a thriving pottery through 1884, during the very years most freedpeople could find only sharecropping work.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2000

Wilt Chamberlain was born in Philadelphia in 1936 and first drew national notice as a schoolboy star at Overbrook High before starring at the University of Kansas. Over a professional career from 1958 to 1973 — with the Harlem Globetrotters, the Warriors and 76ers, and the Los Angeles Lakers — the towering center rewrote the record books, most famously scoring 100 points in a single game in 1962. A four-time Most Valuable Player and Hall of Famer, he remains one of the most dominant athletes the sport has ever seen.

Derry Township, PA · est. 2002

On the night of March 2, 1962, in a game played in Hershey, Philadelphia Warriors center Wilt Chamberlain did something no one has matched: he scored 100 points in a single NBA game, leading his team past the New York Knicks 169–147 before a modest crowd of 4,124. It capped a season of staggering dominance in which Chamberlain averaged 50.4 points a game and topped 50 points on 45 separate nights.

Frankfort, KY

On December 26, 1915, the Women's Club Hospital Company, backed by community support, opened a hospital here and named it for Winnie A. Scott, a local teacher who helped found it. In the segregated era it was the only Frankfort hospital serving African Americans, filling that role until King's Daughters Hospital desegregated in 1959.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2001

Founded by Germantown Quakers in 1885, the Wissahickon Boys Club became, in 1906, the first member of the national Boys Club Federation to serve an African American community. Under president John T. Emlen and executive director William T. Coleman, it built a lasting reputation for its work with young people, and its alumni came to include entertainer Bill Cosby and football star Herb Adderley. Renamed the Wissahickon Boys & Girls Club in 1981, it relocated to this site in 1985.

Louisville, KY

In the closing years of the 1700s, families pushed into the rolling country east of the Ohio River that would become Jefferson County, Kentucky, and this corridor marked one of the area's earliest waves of settlement. Fertile bottomland and reliable water drew a working community together — farmers tilling the rich soil, millers harnessing the branches to grind grain, tradesmen serving the crossroads, and African-American residents whose labor and lives were woven into the settlement from its beginnings. The old routes preserved here, Wolf Pen and Mint Springs Branch Roads among them, trace the paths those first neighbors wore into the landscape.

Austin, TX

Along the west bank of Shoal Creek, on what was once frontier Austin's natural edge, formerly enslaved people made a home after the Civil War, building one of the African American settlements of West Austin. As domestic workers, carpenters, drivers, and laborers, its residents shaped the life of the city even while surrounded by wealthier Anglo neighbors in an era of hardening racial lines. After Austin's 1928 master plan pushed Black residents toward a district east of East Avenue, Mexican and Mexican American families took up the houses along the creek, and the community persisted into the 1970s.

Tyler, TX

The Wood-Verner Cemetery, named for two landowning families, is the oldest known graveyard in Tyler's Dixie community, its earliest marked grave that of John Gordon in 1850. Long tied to the local Methodist church and now kept by a volunteer association, it holds a cross-section of frontier Texas: pioneer settlers, Polish immigrants, former slaves, and at least two Civil War veterans. Many of its graves are unmarked.

Arlington, TX

On an April day in 1901, worshippers met under a brush arbor to found a congregation led by the Rev. Washington Lafayette Wood, a missionary who had come to Tarrant County from Alabama a decade earlier. On land donated by a neighbor they raised a small white frame sanctuary, baptized converts in nearby creeks, and held their church together through the Depression years, eventually building the 1948 sanctuary still used today.

Woodstock Township, MI

In 1844 Prior Foster, a free Black man from Ohio, opened a school "in the woods" of Lenawee County, and by 1848 it was formally incorporated as the Woodstock Manual Labor Institute. Designed to educate "colored people and others," it offered a full course of study at a time when few schools anywhere in America welcomed Black students. Like other manual-labor institutes of the era, it paired classroom learning with farm and workshop labor, letting students earn their keep while they learned.

Austin, TX

When Edwin Waller laid out Austin as the Republic of Texas capital in 1839, he set aside four public squares; three of the city's first churches, including two early African American congregations, rose around this one. For decades it sat unimproved until Mayor A.P. Wooldridge championed a cleanup and a bandstand in 1909. From that stage came voices ranging from Booker T. Washington and suffragist Minnie Fisher Cunningham to a young Lyndon Johnson launching his first Senate run, while 1960s civil rights marches and counterculture gatherings—including the debut of Austin's armadillo icon—kept the square at the center of civic life.

Wortham, TX

Education in Wortham began in the 1870s as a cooperative effort of the Masonic Lodge and the Methodist church, with ministers teaching from donated books, before the first public school opened in 1883. In 1891 Wortham became the first independent school district in Freestone County, and the discovery of oil in 1924 transformed a town of 1,000 into a boomtown of 20,000 nearly overnight — swelling one classroom from 18 pupils to 84 in just four days. The system grew by absorbing rural schools and, in 1966, merged the F. W. Wheeler School for Black students into a single district.

Prairie View, TX

This burial ground began on Jared E. Kirby's Alta Vista Plantation, where, by oral tradition, the Kirby family set aside land for the graves of enslaved people from Alta Vista and from cousin Leonard Waller Croce's nearby Liendo Plantation. Its many unmarked graves are believed to date to the antebellum years, when the enslaved rarely had means for lasting headstones. After emancipation the community kept using the site — Kirby's widow deeded the plantation in 1876 for what became Prairie View A&M University — and it took the name of the nearby Wyatt Chapel, holding the graves of former slaves, their descendants, and veterans of both World Wars.

Asheville, NC

Established in 1892, the Young Men's Institute was built as a center of social, moral, and religious life for the Black workers who helped construct George Vanderbilt's Biltmore Estate. Black-owned businesses thrived in the building that stood just south of this marker. The YMI became an enduring anchor of Asheville's African American community.

Beaumont, TX

Founded in 1911 with ten members and chartered in 1914, the Beaumont Young Women's Christian Association gave the oil-boom city's working women a place of their own, meeting in the Temperance Hall until they built their own building in 1918. That same year the teacher Frances Morris organized a club for the city's Black girls, which was chartered as a YWCA branch shortly after her death in 1933. The two long-separate branches finally merged in 1969.

Silver City, TX

North Carolinians Alexander Younger and his wife Jane came to Texas in 1847, first receiving land in the Peters colony before settling to farm in Navarro County. In 1854 they set aside part of the farm to bury their son, and the plot grew into a community cemetery of more than 1,600 graves. Around 1860 the adjacent Woodward Cemetery began as a burial ground for enslaved people, and the site — still in use, with an annual May homecoming — holds many of the Purdon area's pioneer settlers and early leaders.