African American History

Houston, TX

During World War I, Houston's African American community organized to serve its youth and the Black troops stationed at Camp Logan, and in 1917 a YWCA recreation center opened in the Masonic building on Clay Street. Granted branch status in 1920, the Blue Triangle YWCA ran athletic, musical, and educational programs, a boarding house, and Depression-era job services for women and girls. In 1950 the branch built this Transitional-style center, designed by noted architects Salisbury and Briscoe, on land donated by community women.

Pass Christian, MS

Though blues and jazz are often told as separate stories, along the Gulf Coast the two grew up intertwined from the start. Pass Christian's native son Captain John Handy (1900–1971) wove blues deep into his traditional jazz and rhythm & blues, as did other local players. The town has honored this African American musical heritage with festivals such as "Jazz in the Pass," first held in 1999.

Flynn, TX

The Boggy Community was founded in 1865 by Robert Bowers, a former slave, and his wife Celia North Bowers of the Keechi tribe, whose Indigenous agricultural knowledge helped the settlement thrive on cotton, corn, and garden crops. From its first year the community prized education, opening a school in a log building and later sharing structures with Bethana Baptist Church, the Masons, and the Order of the Eastern Star. The Bowers family, their descendants, veterans, and many original citizens rest in the Boggy Cemetery, and their model of church, school, and cemetery was carried to other Texas communities.

Port Bolivar, TX

Bolivar Point was a stage for the tangled struggles over Spanish Texas in the early 1800s: Colonel Henry Perry camped here in 1815 planning an invasion, and the privateer Louis-Michel de Aury — who named the point for South American liberator Simón Bolívar — marched captive Africans from this shore toward New Orleans in 1816. James Long built Fort Las Casas here in 1820–21, where his wife Jane gave birth to a daughter often called the first Anglo child born in Texas. A federal lighthouse rose in 1852, was dismantled by Confederate troops, and rebuilt after the Civil War, later sheltering residents through the deadly storms of 1900 and 1915.

Pittsburg, TX

In the 1850s Ebenezer "Ebb" and Martha Bolton built a large East Texas plantation worked by enslaved people. After emancipation and Ebb's death in 1877, Martha set aside land for their former slaves, and a Freedmen's community called Bolton grew up around it. The cemetery, begun in 1861, holds the Boltons alongside generations of the freed families and their descendants who made new lives here.

Houston, TX

Founded in 1893 as Colored High School in Houston's Fourth Ward, this was the first high school open to African Americans in the city, teaching Latin, science, mathematics and more at a time when Black secondary education was scarce across the South. It produced its first graduate by 1896, housed Houston's first library accessible to African Americans in 1909, and became a seedbed for higher education that ultimately grew into Texas Southern University. Renamed in 1927 for Booker T. Washington, the school later relocated to Independence Heights and pioneered Houston's first magnet program in 1974.

Mexia, TX

Set aside by deed in 1898, this park was dedicated to celebrating June 19th — Juneteenth — the day in 1865 when enslaved Texans learned of their freedom, first announced just a few miles south of here. Limestone County's Black community produced notable Reconstruction-era leaders, including constitutional convention delegate Ralph Long and legislators Giles Cotton, Dave Medlock, and Sheppard Mullins. Crowds of up to 20,000 once gathered for the annual observance, chartered under the 19th of June Organization in 1912.

Arlington, TX

Rooted in Arlington's first Black school of the 1890s, this institution educated generations of African American children in the neighborhood known as The Hill, with the Church of God in Christ lending classroom space as needed. Teachers George Stevens and Gloria Echols lived among their students, and Stevens served as principal for decades; graduates continued on to I.M. Terrell High School in Fort Worth. A modern facility opened in 1954, named for educator Booker T. Washington, until Arlington's 1965 desegregation closed the school.

Borger, TX

When the oil-boom town of Borger counted just five African American students in 1928, their first classes met under the roof of Bethel Baptist Church with Tallie Anderson Smith as teacher. By 1931 the district had opened a one-room school named for educator Booker T. Washington, and under principal R. G. Cofield after 1946 it grew into a twelve-grade campus with new buildings, a proud faculty, and championship Dragons and Dragonettes teams. Desegregation after Brown v. Board reshaped it into an elementary school and finally closed it in 1964.

Elysian Fields, TX

After emancipation, the Black community of Elysian Fields built its own church, cemetery, and school, opening a two-room Colored School in 1870 that offered both elementary and high-school grades for four decades. The school moved with the town toward the railroad in 1911 and, in 1954, was renamed for Booker T. Washington, the famed educator and founder of Tuskegee. It became the town's integrated elementary school in 1970.

Texas City, TX

Public schooling for Black children in Texas City began in 1915 in borrowed churches and lodge halls, until the district finally provided a building on this site in 1937. For years students could go only through the seventh — later the tenth — grade, forcing families to send their children to Galveston, until a high school building completed the campus in 1953. Named for Booker T. Washington, the school anchored African American community life until integration closed it in 1969.

Gainesville, TX

Two years before Gainesville created a public school system, a young man named Island Sparks began teaching the city's Black children in 1880, and in 1886 the city built a frame schoolhouse for them on this site. Known first as the Gainesville Colored School, it took the name Booker T. Washington by the 1920s, and its original building was replaced by a WPA-built brick structure in 1939. Desegregation in 1965–66 brought its era as a Black school to a close.

Weatherford, TX

Born into slavery in Mississippi in 1834, Bose Ikard came to Texas as a child and stayed on as an employee after emancipation. In 1866 he joined Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving's famous cattle drives, becoming one of Goodnight's most trusted cowboys and closest friends. He later settled in Weatherford, raised six children, and at his death in 1929 was honored with a granite headstone that Goodnight himself erected.

Waco, TX

Burials began here as early as 1850 on ten acres given for a school and cemetery, where a log schoolhouse once served both Methodists and Baptists. The ground holds a striking cross-section of early Texas: veterans of the 1836 San Jacinto campaign, dozens of Confederate soldiers, pioneer families, and the unmarked graves of enslaved people. Each row of stones speaks to a different chapter of the state's contested past.

Shamrock, TX

Since the 1920s, Bowers Cemetery has been the burial ground for Shamrock's African American community, its oldest marked grave dating to 1926. Also called West Shamrock Cemetery and known locally as Boot Hill, it took its name from a Black addition to the town developed by David Laughlin Bowers, with land reportedly given by Manse Lisles. Many of those buried here came to Shamrock with a road-paving crew in 1926 and stayed to build a full community—complete with its own gas station, café, school, and church.

Williamsport, PA · est. 2000

When Bowman Field opened in 1926 as Memorial Field, minor league baseball was a fixture of nearly every American town, and Williamsport's new park quickly earned its place in the game's lore. Its very first professional contest pitted the Williamsport Grays against the Harrisburg Giants of the Negro leagues — a reminder that Black professional baseball drew crowds and talent in an era of segregation. Renamed in 1929 for J. Walton Bowman, the ballpark went on to host home teams and major league exhibition clubs for generations.

Meridian, TX

On this Bosque County homesite—now marked only by a surviving log kitchen—grew up John A. Lomax, who would become one of America's greatest collectors of folk music. Sitting astride the Chisholm Trail, young Lomax absorbed the ballads of trail-driving cowboys and the jig tunes, chants, and work songs of Black servants, jotting the music down while still a boy. When he left home at twenty he carried a roll of cowboy ballads that became the seed of a lifetime's work preserving the nation's vernacular song.

Glynn County, GA

A half-mile west lies Boys Estate, a home for boys set on part of the old Elizafield Plantation, once among the rich rice and sugar estates of the Georgia coast. In the early 19th century Elizafield was the domain of Dr. Robert Grant and later his son Hugh Fraser Grant, cultivated intensively in rice and cane; the tabby ruins of a great sugar mill still stand. Given to the state as a park by Cator Woolford in 1935, the tract was set aside in 1945 for the boys' home.

Houston County, TX

In 1838, as the young Republic of Texas drew settlers west, Bradford Davis left Mississippi to farm the Houston County frontier — and, in a detail that captures how raw that frontier was, met his death while checking bee bait. His sons carried the family into the next generation as farmers, a gin operator, a river merchant shipping goods down the Trinity, and a schoolteacher. Family members and the enslaved people they held are buried together on this ground.

McKinney, TX

Edward Bradley brought his family from Kentucky in the 1840s as members of the Peters Colony, building a log home on a branch of Wilson's Creek in what is now McKinney. A nearby hillside became the family graveyard and then a community cemetery, holding eleven marked headstones and many unmarked graves — including, in a wooded plot to the south, an enslaved people's cemetery marked with bois d'arc wood. The oldest documented burial is Edward Bradley himself, who died in 1855.

Brenham, TX

Brenham Normal and Industrial College grew out of a 1905 meeting of Black and white community leaders after educator Daniel Porter came seeking land for a school for African Americans, and it was legally established in 1906. Its board was led by A.L. Sledge, a former slave who had served in the Texas Legislature, and its inaugural class of ten swelled to 130 students by 1913. The college trained future schoolteachers alongside courses in trades, business, agriculture, and domestic arts before closing in 1927, though its theological department carried on.

Grapeland, TX

Determined to worship in a church of their own after emancipation, freed people of the Percilla, Augusta, and Glover communities built a small wood-framed church on former plantation land in 1880, naming it for their first pastor, the Reverend Sam Brewer. The same building served as the Elliott Springs School for local African American children. Over more than 130 years the congregation moved several times among family farms, and it joined the broader Baptist associations that promoted religious education across East Texas.

Edgecombe County, NC

Established in 1895 through the philanthropy of Mrs. Joseph K. Brick, the Brick School was founded to educate African Americans in an era of rigid segregation and scarce opportunity. It grew into a junior college by 1926 before closing in 1933, and its buildings once stood on this ground.

Bowling Green, OH

This memorial honors the 'Kent Four and the Jackson Two' — the students killed in the spring of 1970 when National Guardsmen fired on antiwar demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio and, days later, police opened fire at Jackson State College in Mississippi. The shootings came amid nationwide campus protests against the widening war in Southeast Asia. Their deaths shocked the country and became defining moments of a bitterly divided era.

Chapman, TX

This burial ground began in 1861 when Eli Buckner set aside a half-acre around his family's graves as a public cemetery, and it grew as pioneer families poured into the Chapman community—among them the Reverend J. C. Alford Bridges, who reportedly arrived from the Deep South with ten children in twenty covered wagons. A Confederate veteran, Bridges bought the land in gold and gave it his name, and his descendants served as postmasters and neighbors for generations. Today the cemetery holds pioneers, dozens of veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam, and, in unmarked graves, people believed to have been enslaved.

Concord, MA

In the decades surrounding the American Revolution, slavery persisted even in Massachusetts towns like Concord, and the men and women who won their freedom often built new lives on the margins of the communities that had once held them. Brister and Fenda Freeman were among these formerly enslaved residents, making a home near this spot and raising a family in the years of the young republic. The surname they carried — Freeman — was itself a quiet declaration of the liberty they had claimed.

Graham, TX

Britt Johnson, a formerly enslaved African American frontiersman, worked as a cowboy and scout near Fort Belknap when the Elm Creek Raid of October 1864 killed his son and carried his wife and children into captivity. He tracked his family and, by daring and stealth, recovered them from Indian Territory. In 1871 Kiowa warriors attacked his camp near this spot; the more than one hundred spent shells around his body testified to the fierce fight he and two companions waged before they were killed.

Houston, TX

Organized in 1881, Brown Chapel A.M.E. was founded to serve Black residents of Houston's West End and Chaneyville — the district that became the Sixth Ward — and took its name from its first pastor, the Rev. Louis Brown. Fire destroyed the original 1882 sanctuary in 1917, and the congregation immediately began the frame building that still stands, later enlarged to two stories and clad in brick in 1944. It remains a cornerstone of the historic Sixth Ward.

Del Rio, TX

Del Rio rose on a site where spring water had drawn people for centuries — a Pre-Columbian village, early Spanish explorers, and finally the permanent community of San Felipe Del Rio in the 1860s. As irrigation companies and the railroad spurred growth, George Washington Brown, a long-serving county official, donated land for the town's first plaza. Dedicated on Cinco de Mayo in 1908, Brown Plaza became the heart of community life, with a hand-built kiosko, concerts, promenades, and political gatherings.

Morgan County, GA

The neighboring communities of Brownwood and Centennial grew up along the old stagecoach road between Augusta and Sandtown, where a roadside house once served as an inn and stage stop. The Brown family built up the area with a mill, church, and school, while African American residents founded their own institutions, including Thankful Church and School and Moseley's Chapel. By the late 1800s, Centennial took on its own identity around a new church, cemetery, and academy, and Morgan County placed this marker at its bicentennial to remember them.

Riverside, TX

After the Civil War, freed people around Riverside gathered to build a church of their own, and mine contractor James Broyles donated a site that took his name. Broyles Chapel Missionary Baptist Church opened its doors in 1895 under Reverend Nemon as the first African-American congregation in Riverside. It endures as a living reminder of the determination that carried a community from bondage into self-governed worship.

Bryan County, GA

Organized in 1869, Bryan Neck Missionary Baptist Church is the oldest African American congregation in lower Bryan County. Its first building, a 'Prayer House,' rose in 1870 beside the white Presbyterian 'Burnt Church,' led by London Harris, a freedman and community spiritual leader who was among its founders and first pastor. The church was renovated and enlarged in 1939 with support from Henry Ford, then building the nearby Harbor school.

Bryan County, GA

On the plantation coast of lower Bryan County, a group of wealthy rice planters organized this Presbyterian congregation, certified by the Presbytery of Georgia in 1830 and built into a frame meeting house by 1839. Fire claimed the first sanctuary, and the present church—the oldest public building in the county—rose in 1885. The founders' world of tidal rice fields depended entirely on enslaved labor, and the old burial ground, Burnt Church Cemetery, still holds the graves of these prominent early families.

Louisville, KY

In 1914 Louisville passed a residential segregation ordinance barring people from moving onto a block where another race was the majority. The NAACP engineered a test case: William Warley agreed to buy a lot from Charles Buchanan, then withheld full payment because the law would forbid him from living there. When the dispute reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1917, the justices struck the ordinance down, delivering the first major legal blow against government-mandated housing segregation.

Morton, TX

In the summer of 1877, troopers of Company A, 10th Cavalry—the African American Buffalo Soldiers who helped guard the Texas frontier—set out from their posts to pursue a Comanche party across the arid Llano Estacado. The Comanches drew the column away from every water hole, and after days in the heat Capt. Nicholas Nolan led his parched men and animals back toward Double Lakes, having gone 86 hours without water. Four soldiers who wandered off in a desperate search for water never came back.

Tahoka, TX

After the Civil War, African American "Buffalo Soldiers" patrolled the western frontier, and in July 1877 Company A of the 10th Cavalry set out from Double Lake in pursuit of a Comanche party. The Comanche drew the troopers away from water, and the soldiers endured extreme heat and 86 hours without water; horses and mules died and men became lost searching for springs. Four soldiers died on the expedition, including Pvt. John T. Gordon, buried at Double Lakes.

Mobeetie, TX

Fort Elliott was raised in 1875 to help confine Native peoples to Indian Territory reservations, and it was garrisoned in part by African American "buffalo soldiers" of the 9th and 10th Cavalry and 24th and 25th Infantry. They patrolled the Texas–Indian Territory line, guarded mail coaches, and strung telegraph lines. Among them served Lt. Henry O. Flipper—born to enslaved parents in 1856, the first Black graduate of West Point and the Army's first Black commissioned officer—who oversaw building a telegraph line across the Canadian River.

Durham, NC

From the 1920s through the 1940s, Durham's Hayti neighborhood and tobacco-warehouse district nurtured a distinctive regional blues sound. Musicians such as Blind Boy Fuller (Fulton Allen) and Blind Gary Davis played its streets and clubs, and their recordings shaped generations of players to come.

Cedar Springs vicinity, TX

One of the oldest cemeteries in Falls County, Bull Hill served for more than a century as a burial ground for African Americans, first for people enslaved on Churchill Jones's vast plantation and later for the freedpeople of the China Grove community. After emancipation, families such as the Baileys, Currys, and Taylors built a church, a school, and a vibrant freedmen's settlement, with some acquiring land and starting businesses. Archaeology and oral history have since confirmed more than 100 burials at this hallowed site, where the last interment took place in 1961.

New Iberia, LA

This New Iberia grave holds Willie 'Bunk' Johnson, a Louisiana trumpeter whose playing reached back to the earliest days of New Orleans jazz. Largely forgotten by the 1930s, he was rediscovered by music scholars in the 1940s and fitted with new teeth and a horn so he could record again. His late-career comeback made him a living link to the music's founding generation.

Village of Kinderhook, NY

In 1816, a bequest from John Rodgers set aside this quarter-acre in Kinderhook expressly as a burying ground for "persons of color," and it served that purpose until around 1861. In an era when free and enslaved Black residents were routinely denied a place in white cemeteries, dedicated grounds like this were among the few spaces where African American families could bury and remember their dead with dignity. The Hudson Valley village had a substantial community of free and enslaved Black residents in the early 19th century.

Ennis, TX

In 1856 William R. and Edeline House bought this land in a bargain paid with an enslaved man named John, and after her husband's death Edeline laid out a 25-block town and donated an acre for a graveyard in 1861. When the Houston and Texas Central Railroad bypassed Burnam Square in 1871 and founded Ennis instead, residents and businesses drifted away. Today a small burial ground of some forty graves is all that survives of the vanished community.

Bryan County, GA

Established near here in 1830, Bryan Neck Presbyterian Church was the oldest organized congregation in Bryan County, serving the planter families of a lower-Bryan coast that had become one of the most productive rice-growing districts on the south Atlantic. Its burial ground lay beside the wooden sanctuary, and here rest members of prominent early families such as the Clays, McAllisters, and Maxwells. After the church accidentally burned in 1882, a new building rose in 1885 several miles east near Keller.

Throckmorton, TX

On the rough post–Civil War Texas frontier, a dispute over rustled cattle turned deadly in 1873. Rancher Bill Hayes, accused by rancher-outlaw John Larn of stealing stock, was pursued by a posse joined by Buffalo Soldiers from Fort Griffin, who killed Hayes and several of his men; the surviving cowboys were arrested and, tradition holds, murdered on the road back. The victims are believed to lie in Bush Knob Cemetery.

Tyler, TX

In 1905 the Rev. Cornelius Moses Butler and trustees of the East Texas Baptist Association founded the East Texas Baptist Academy to expand educational opportunity for African American youth around Tyler. Renamed Butler College after Butler's death in 1924, the school evolved from academy to junior college to a four-year liberal arts college before financial pressures forced its closure in 1971. A heritage building rose on the site in 1992 to mark its legacy.

Hamilton Township, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, southwestern Ohio sat on the front line of the struggle over slavery — just across the river from the slaveholding South, it became threaded with secret routes north. Built in 1820, the Butterworth family's homestead in Warren County served as the county's southernmost link in that clandestine network, sheltering freedom-seekers who had crossed the Ohio River and guiding them toward safety. Beyond hiding refugees, the Butterworths helped bring the railroads to the region and founded Maineville Academy, planting schooling alongside their activism. Generations of the family went on to civic and reform leadership.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2014

Built in 1846–47 beside the Byberry Friends Meeting, Byberry Hall was raised by the renowned African American abolitionist Robert Purvis and others as a place to debate slavery and the great social questions of the day. Its platform welcomed famous reformers, including James and Lucretia Mott and William Lloyd Garrison. Purvis's nearby farm was a regular Underground Railroad station, and he estimated he helped more than 9,000 people escape bondage.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 2006

C. DeLores Tucker rose through the civil rights movement to become, in Pennsylvania, the first African American woman to serve as a Secretary of State anywhere in the nation. From that office she championed the state Equal Rights Amendment, affirmative action, voter registration by mail, and lowering the voting age to eighteen. Later she led a high-profile campaign against music lyrics she saw as demeaning to women, African Americans, and children.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2006

For 47 years C. DeLores Tucker made her home here while becoming one of Pennsylvania's most forceful advocates for civil rights and women's equality. As the nation's first African American woman to serve as a state Secretary of State, she championed the state Equal Rights Amendment, affirmative action, mail-in voter registration, and lowering the voting age to 18. Late in life she led a high-profile campaign against music lyrics she considered demeaning to women and Black Americans.

Round Rock, TX

T. J. Caldwell and his wife Letitia raised this sturdy limestone house on the eve of the Civil War in 1860, quarrying its walls from the surrounding land and, as the marker plainly records, relying on the labor of enslaved people to build it. Their daughter Mary married Swedish immigrant Sven William Palm, whose family kept the property for more than a century. Around it grew the small Caldwell Heights community of school, cotton gin, and farmsteads.

Call, TX

The Call Church of God in Christ was founded in 1915 under Elder W. G. Law, and in 1935 A. C. and Coella Armstrong deeded land for a church building in this East Texas community. Renamed the Call Community Center Church of God in Christ in 1948, the congregation hosted district meetings and supported missionary work at home and abroad. An inscription on its base honors the dedicated women who were its early workers.

Calvert, TX

Built in 1929 with help from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, this was one of the largest Rosenwald schools in Texas, replacing the meager 'plantation schools' that had been Black students' only option in Robertson County. The community raised its own share of the cost, and under longtime headmaster W. D. Spigner, enrollment grew as he drew in children from surrounding rural schools. Over the decades it added grades, plumbing, and a gymnasium, was renamed in Spigner's honor, and its building still stands, cared for by the alumni association.

Houston, TX

Soon after the United States entered World War I, the Army established Camp Logan here in July 1917 as one of 34 training camps, a 7,600-acre complex named for Civil War general and senator John A. Logan. During construction, Black soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry, stationed nearby, rose in armed revolt on August 23, 1917, against Houston's Jim Crow laws and police abuse—the deadly "Houston Mutiny and Riot of 1917." Divisions trained here shipped out to fight in France in 1918, and after the camp closed part of its land became Memorial Park, named for the soldiers who fought in Europe.

Jessamine County, KY

Established in 1863, Camp Nelson housed the families of African American soldiers and became the chief center issuing emancipation papers to the formerly enslaved. Conditions in the makeshift camp were deadly—many women and children died of disease and exposure, and a brutal winter expulsion in 1864 killed many more—until the Reverend John G. Fee and other humanitarian workers won improvements. A school, hospital, and permanent housing eventually served up to 3,000 people in their transition to freedom, though the Army's 1866 withdrawal left refugees exposed to violent white "regulators."

Pymatuning Township, PA · est. 1994

From 1942 to 1945 this 3,300-acre tract in Mercer County was a vast U.S. Army staging base — first the Shenango Personnel Replacement Depot, renamed Camp Reynolds in 1943 — through which roughly a million soldiers passed on their way to the war, most bound for Europe. At its peak 75,000 troops were housed here at once, and racial tensions among them boiled over in July 1943. The camp also held more than 1,800 German prisoners of war.

Cheltenham Township, PA · est. 1999

Established in 1863 in Cheltenham Township, Camp William Penn was Pennsylvania's only training camp for African American soldiers and the largest of eighteen such camps in the nation. Over 10,000 men in eleven regiments of United States Colored Troops trained here before shipping out to fight in Virginia, South Carolina, Florida, and beyond; the camp closed in August 1865 as the war ended.

Jasper, TX

Adam Byerly came to Texas from South Carolina in 1834 and received a Mexican land grant on Sandy Creek, where the site became a Methodist camp meeting ground known as Byerly Campground. Byerly sold ten acres to the church in 1843, and a cemetery for the area's African American residents took shape to the south. Its earliest marked grave is that of Tom Limbrick (1827–1908), and many former slaves, community leaders, and veterans rest here. Ties with nearby Armstrong C.M.E. Church give the site its alternate name, Armstrong Campground Cemetery.

Brenham, TX

Camptown is the oldest predominantly African American cemetery in Brenham, dating from the 1860s and tied to the nearby Mount Rose Missionary Baptist Church. Its name comes from the federal troops who camped here from 1865 to 1868 to keep peace between emancipated Black residents and landowners, and a July 1868 army map already shows the cemetery in use. Among an estimated 400 burials are former slaves, possibly soldiers lost to yellow fever, and Caroline Seward (1811–1902) of the Seward Plantation.

Wyalusing Township, PA · est. 1947

Stephen Foster, the songwriter often called the father of American popular music, spent time along the Susquehanna at Towanda and Athens, and tradition holds that the nearby community of Camptown gave him the title for one of his best-known tunes. Written in the mid-19th century, the bouncing, nonsense-refrained song became a fixture of American parlors and stages. This quiet corner of Bradford County thus lent its name to a piece of the nation's musical memory.

Richmond Hill, GA

Canaan Baptist Church, a primarily African American congregation, was organized in 1913 by the Rev. David Boles, Sr. and Deacon Fred Gilbert—the only organized denominational church in what is now Richmond Hill in the early 20th century. Its present sanctuary was built with support from Henry Ford, who developed extensive holdings in the area. Many founding members descended from the enslaved people who had worked the antebellum rice plantations at nearby Cherry Hill and Silk Hope.