African American History

Van Alstyne, TX

Elijah Cannon brought his eleven sons and the people he enslaved from South Carolina to Texas in 1852, settling this corner of Grayson County. In 1874 the family graveyard was formally deeded as a community burial ground; its oldest documented grave is that of ten-year-old Nancy J. Bowen from 1857. A separate section was set aside for formerly enslaved people, beginning with Billy and Glory Boyd in 1880, and today the cemetery holds more than 700 graves of pioneers and war veterans.

Carrollton, TX

Carrollton's early African-American residents, many of them formerly enslaved, helped settle and build the town, and by 1871 a corner of farmer Scott Boswell Sr.'s land had become their community cemetery. Though it holds dozens of burials, only three names remain legible, and flooding from the Elm Fork of the Trinity River destroyed many grave markers over the years. Once threatened by development, the ground survives as one of the few tangible records of Black Carrollton's earliest generation.

Ector, TX

Local tradition holds that this Fannin County cemetery took its name from John Carson, who once owned the neighboring land, and that its earliest graves date to an 1842 Indian raid on the nearby home of Dr. W. M. Hunter. The three victims were Minerva Hunter, her young daughter Elizabeth, and an enslaved or hired African American woman whose name has been lost to record. Cemetery trustees secured title by 1878 and later added land, and Minerva Hunter's grave was finally marked in 1942, a century after her death.

Wills Point, TX

Wills Point made provisions for its first African American public school around 1878, and despite chronic underfunding it drew certified Black teachers who taught children by day and their parents by night. In 1930 it was named for principal Robert L. Cartwright, and a new building rose with land and labor from the local Black community and a grant from the Rosenwald Foundation. Extended to a twelfth grade and accredited by 1949, the school graduated its last class in 1965 as integration arrived.

Brackettville, TX

After the Army disbanded Fort Clark's Seminole-Negro Indian Scout Detachment in 1914, the Seminole families relocated to Brackettville, where in 1919 the school district bought land for a "colored school." A two-story 1870 limestone homestead became the George Washington Carver School, once the only accredited Black school between San Antonio and El Paso. The grounds later passed to the Seminole community and remain a cultural center for Juneteenth and Seminole Day gatherings.

City of Niagara Falls, NY

From about 1825 to 1945, the Cataract House stood as one of Niagara Falls' grandest hotels, drawing travelers from around the world to the edge of the great cataract. Its dining room and service were run largely by an African American staff — skilled waiters who, beyond their hospitality, did something far more daring. Just steps from the Niagara River and the Canadian shore, these workers used their knowledge of the crossing to guide freedom seekers across the water and out of reach of slavery.

Houston County, TX

Cedar Branch grew from an extraordinary act at the close of slavery: a planter couple deeded parcels of their own cotton plantation to each of their former slaves, who built a community on the land. The freedmen organized a church in 1862 and raised a sanctuary in 1864, and by 1888 a school met in the church building—the church remaining the community's heart to this day.

Grapeland, TX

Schooling at Cedar Branch dates to at least 1888, and in 1895 the local church donated its old sanctuary to serve as a schoolhouse. By 1911 the settlement was its own common-school district, and a two-room school later rose on this site with help from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, the philanthropy famous for financing schools for African-American children across the rural South. The school anchored the community until it consolidated with Grapeland in 1952.

Muldoon, TX

Around 1875, the African American community of Cedar Creek laid out this burial ground behind the church built by their African Methodist Episcopal congregation, organized in 1874 on land from the estate of N. W. Faison. The earliest known grave dates to 1877, and among the markers are striking folk creations—one shaped like a concrete ball, another of petrified wood, and several studded with seashells. The church served for more than half a century, and today the cemetery is all that remains of the Cedar Creek community.

Milam, TX

Established around 1890 on land granted in 1830, Cedar Grove was among the first African American Baptist churches in Sabine County. After moving to its present location in 1904, the congregation's building doubled as a school for Black students by 1915, making it a cornerstone of education and community support in the era of segregation.

Satin, TX

On August 20, 1865, sixteen newly emancipated men and women gathered on a Brazos River plantation to form their own congregation, first called Buhl's Quarters Baptist Church, meeting in a log cabin. As floods, growth, and finally the stripping of nearby land for gravel forced repeated moves, the church was renamed Rock Dam and then Cedar Grove, carrying with it a bell given in 1890 that still called worshippers when the congregation built anew in Satin. Local memory even recalls a brother summoning members to service with a bugle.

Burkeville, TX

After the Civil War, a group of freedmen founded the Cedar Grove community here to take advantage of the area's strong cotton market, naming it for the cedars they cut for lumber. At its heart stood the Cedar Grove Community Church, organized with help from the Spears Chapel congregation, which also housed the community's first school. River-transport losses in the 1880s, followed by disease and floods, drove the settlement's decline, leaving the church and cemetery as its enduring markers.

Lovelady, TX

The Ellis family came from Mississippi to Texas in 1839, part of the wave of southern settlers pushing into the region in the years before statehood. Charles McHenry Ellis raised a large family here, and in 1876 his son deeded land, including the family burial ground, for use as a church and cemetery. Among its early graves is that of Elizabeth Lovelady Ellis, alongside unmarked graves believed to be those of enslaved people and, later, military veterans.

Greenville, TX

Born amid the violence and upheaval of Reconstruction, Center Point Christian Church grew from the survival of formerly enslaved families who gathered in the thickets of Hunt County on land no one else wanted. Charlie Haley led early religious meetings until, in 1879, he and the ordained elder Andrew Jackson Hurdle organized a congregation in the middle of those thickets, with Hurdle as its first minister. The church became a pillar of its freedom colony — championing education, jobs, and homes, and even helping staff a Black theological and industrial college — and made a point of building its meeting houses debt-free.

Pittsburg, TX

In 1865, newly freed African Americans founded Center Point, building it into a self-reliant community anchored by the Center Point Baptist Church (1873) and the Industrial Union (chartered 1889), a cooperative that helped members buy farms and run a brick kiln, sawmill, and cotton gin. Its school, led by Mr. and Mrs. L. B. Cash, became a notable vocational campus whose 14 acres of buildings were largely erected by the students themselves, complete with a cooperative boarding plan. The school consolidated with Pittsburg in 1950.

Pittsburg, TX

Center Point grew up as a Freedmen's community in the years just after emancipation, settled by the Willie Johnson family and other formerly enslaved people around 1865–70. In 1899 G. W. Goulsby opened its first school in a single room, and over the following decades it expanded—aided by the Julius Rosenwald Fund—into a full campus with a library, dormitories, cafeteria, and gymnasium, where students ran a working farm and cannery. The school served the community until it closed in 1952.

Philadelphia, PA

By the turn of the 20th century, Philadelphia's Free Library — chartered in 1891 during the great American public-library movement — had outgrown its quarters, and the city set out to give it a grand permanent home on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. When the Central Library opened its doors in 1927, it did so in the stately Beaux Arts manner then favored for civic temples of learning, its design carried out by the prominent Philadelphia firm of Horace Trumbauer alongside Julian Francis Abele, one of the first formally trained African American architects in the nation. The building embodied the era's conviction that a free, monumental library was a cornerstone of a democratic city.

Oxford, NC

Founded in 1883, this was a pioneering institution caring for Black orphaned children on a statewide basis at a time when public welfare rarely extended to African Americans. It grew from the self-help efforts of the Black community and its allies in the post-Reconstruction South.

Fairfield, TX

When Reuben and Mary Chancellor came to the Brown's Creek settlement of Freestone County in the 1850s, they brought a large family, enslaved laborers, and the ambitions of Deep South planters transplanted to the Texas frontier. The land they gave for a church, school, and burying ground became the heart of a rural community, and the Predestinarian Primitive Baptist congregation organized here in 1854 doubled as schoolhouse and gathering place. The cemetery that grew up around it holds four generations of settlers, many infant graves, and veterans of the Civil War and World War II. A separate section set aside for the formerly enslaved records, in stone, the tangled histories that bound these families together.

Charleston, SC

In 19th-century Charleston, free and enslaved African Americans formed mutual-aid and benevolent societies—groups with names like "Charity" and "Benevolence"—that pooled members' dues to care for the sick, support widows and orphans, and guarantee every member a dignified burial. Excluded from many white institutions, these societies often maintained their own cemeteries, making the burial ground both a place of mourning and a testament to community self-reliance. This memorial marks one such African-American cemetery, honoring the societies whose charitable work sustained Charleston's Black community across slavery, the Civil War, and the generations that followed.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2021

After a standout, All-American career at Pittsburgh's Duquesne University, Charles "Chuck" Cooper made history on April 25, 1950, when the Boston Celtics made him the first African American ever drafted by an NBA team. His selection cracked open the color line in professional basketball. Cooper's courage and skill helped pave the way for the integration of a league that would become a global stage.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2024

For half a century Charles "Teenie" Harris turned his camera on Pittsburgh's African American community, amassing more than 80,000 images of everyday life, work, and celebration. Many ran in The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's most influential Black newspapers, and his lens captured the jazz greats who filled the clubs of the Hill District. He developed this vast record in a darkroom in the basement of his own home on Mulford Street.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2023

Born nearby in 1771 into a Philadelphia Quaker family, Charles Brockden Brown is often called America's first important novelist. His brooding Gothic tales, set amid the streets and fevers of his own city, helped invent an American literature and later inspired writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. As a novelist, editor, and historian he also wrestled openly with the questions of his young republic—women's rights, slavery, and the shape of the nation's politics.

Washington, PA · est. 2021

Charles F. West made history in 1922 as the first African American quarterback to play in the Rose Bowl, leading Washington & Jefferson College onto the national stage. When an opposing team demanded he be benched because of his race, West refused to yield, confronting the discrimination of the era head-on. A gifted all-around athlete, he competed in the pentathlon on the 1924 U.S. Olympic team before devoting five decades to medicine as a physician.

Bonham, TX

Born in Bonham in 1916 to musical parents, Charlie Christian developed a distinctive single-string guitar style that helped pioneer the electric guitar as a lead instrument. He joined Benny Goodman's band in 1939 and played with jazz greats and at Carnegie Hall before tuberculosis took his life at just twenty-five.

West Columbia, TX

Born into slavery in the late 1820s and brought to Brazoria County from Virginia before the Civil War, Charlie Brown could not read or write yet built one of the largest fortunes in Texas. Between 1889 and 1910 he owned some 3,000 acres, including much of West Columbia, and ran grist, sugar, and saw mills and the county's first cotton gin. He donated land for churches and for the first school serving African American children in West Columbia, later named in his honor, and by his death in 1920 was called the wealthiest African American in the state.

City of Niagara Falls, NY

In the years before women won the vote, Charlotte Johnson Dett worked for suffrage from her home in Niagara Falls, joining a national push that would culminate in the 19th Amendment's ratification in 1920. By 1913 she had risen to vice president of the Empire State Federation of Women's Clubs, one of the networks through which African American women organized for the ballot, community welfare, and civil rights. Black suffragists like Dett often fought on two fronts at once — for their sex and for their race — within a movement that did not always welcome them as equals. This marker stands near where she once lived.

Wichita Falls, TX

Born in Wichita Falls in 1929 to a family of educators, Charlye Ola Farris was a prodigy who finished high school at 15 and college at 18 before earning her law degree at Howard University, where her class helped prepare the Brown v. Board of Education case. In 1953 she became the first Black woman licensed to practice law in Texas, then opened a solo practice in a county where no Black attorney had actively practiced. A year later she served as county judge pro-tem — the first Black person to sit as a judge in the South since Reconstruction.

Chatfield, TX

Before the Civil War, enslaved people on Robert Hodge's Navarro County plantation organized their own Baptist and A.M.E. congregations, worshipping in a shared building even as white pastors preached to separate Black and white audiences. After emancipation many freedpeople stayed on as sharecroppers and landowners, and the Baptist congregation endured. Among its sons was Sutton E. Griggs, born in Chatfield in 1872, who became a noted African American minister and novelist, following his father Allen R. Griggs, a champion of Black education in Texas.

Lexington, KY

On Lexington's public square, the Cheapside Auction Block was the site where thousands of enslaved African Americans were bought and sold in the nineteenth century, including children torn from their parents. By the late 1840s Lexington had become the center of Kentucky's slave trade and a market feeding the brutal export of people farther south. Nearby stood a whipping post, established in 1847, in a county where by 1860 one in four Lexington residents was enslaved.

Alto, TX

In 1864 and 1865 this site produced crude kettles and plow tools from abundant, easily mined local iron ore, smelted with charcoal made from nearby timber. The workers were enslaved people who had fled the fighting of Louisiana's Red River Campaign. It was one of two war plants in a county whose ironmaking helped earn Texas the name "Storehouse of the Confederacy."

Copper Canyon, TX

Elisha and Mary Stowe Chinn bought this hilltop north of Lockhart Spring in 1853 and gave ten acres for a chapel and graveyard, where early settlers were buried as deaths came to the young community. A road built in 1885 finally connected the isolated cemetery to nearby Waketon, following an old wagon trail. Its markers range from rough fieldstones and native limestone to ornate later monuments, and some plots bear shell-outlined earthen mounds — a folk burial tradition brought to America by enslaved Africans.

Chireno, TX

Rooted in a 1792 Spanish land grant along El Camino Real de los Tejas, the Chireno community took shape in the 1830s as incoming colonists bought tracts from the grantee's heirs. The cemetery donated in 1844 was divided into segregated Anglo and African American grounds and holds pioneer families, war veterans, and Missouri Fowler Woolam, remembered as the first Protestant woman missionary of Texas.

Fredericksburg, TX

By the 1870s several Black families lived in Gillespie County, and they likely first gathered for worship in a schoolhouse built in 1877 before erecting this simple frame church a decade later. In 1887 Oscar Basse deeded the lot to trustees of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, who built the steepled sanctuary atop a native limestone foundation. After the local Black community dispersed, youth of many faiths restored the building, rededicating it in 1976 to national recognition.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

When it opened its doors in 1914, the Christian Street YMCA became the first Black YMCA in the nation to occupy its own building. In an age of rigid segregation, it offered African Americans a rare space of their own for recreation, education, and community organizing. Its rooms hosted meetings, lodging, and the everyday gatherings that knit Philadelphia's Black neighborhoods together.

Palestine, TX

Born in Palestine in 1850, Chris Rogers came of age in a violent era, guarding Confederate prisoners at Camp Ford as a boy before becoming the town's most famous and most controversial lawman. As city marshal he cracked a notorious train robbery and solved the killing of a doctor targeted for serving African Americans, and he repeatedly clashed with officials over his wish to hire a Black police officer. His career was punctuated by shootings, an impeachment, and a murder trial, and it ended when he was stabbed to death in a saloon in 1888.

Richmond, TX

Evangelist Isom Ford founded this congregation in 1918, the first of its denomination in Richmond, and its first church rose in 1923 in the Freeman Town neighborhood settled by freed people. Remarkably for its time, the church installed a woman, Octavia Laws, as a leader in 1921. Across the decades the building was added to, relocated more than once, and sustained ministries of food, clothing, and care for the community, bridging the generations from Freeman Town's emancipated founders to the present.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1999

Built between 1887 and 1897 as a soaring Gothic Revival church, the Church of the Advocate became a spiritual and political anchor for North Philadelphia's growing African American community after 1930. It hosted major Black Power gatherings in the 1960s and '70s, and in 1974 it made history as the site where the first eleven women were ordained Episcopal priests.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

Founded in 1921 by R.R. Wright, Sr.—a man born to enslaved parents who rose to prominence as an educator and entrepreneur—this bank served Black customers long shut out of mainstream finance. It weathered the Great Depression that toppled thousands of American banks and grew to open offices across Philadelphia. For its depositors, it meant access to mortgages, loans, and a measure of economic independence.

Georgetown, TX

Known over the years as Oak Hill, the Georgetown Negro Cemetery, the Colored Cemetery, and the Masonic Cemetery, this burial ground was set aside under segregation for Georgetown's African American and Hispanic residents, paupers, and others. In 1906 Mayor R. E. Ward appointed its first Black trustees, and the city conveyed the grounds to the African American community for upkeep. Some interred here had been enslaved and lived to see Emancipation and Reconstruction; a barbed-wire fence once divided the African American and Hispanic sections.

Laredo, TX

Laredo's earliest burial grounds were the Spanish camposantos, or "saints' fields," the first likely beside San Agustín Church. When the city dedicated this four-block cemetery in 1892, it set aside sections for Catholics, a Jewish burial area, a potter's field, and plots for church, civic, and labor groups — including the Mutualistas, mutual-aid societies vital to the Mexican American labor movement. A smallpox epidemic, an African American section, and generations of Día de los Muertos observances all left their mark on its grounds.

Lubbock, TX

In March 1892 Lubbock residents secured five acres of pasture for a cemetery, holding their first burial that same month for a cowboy who died of pneumonia. For much of the 20th century the grounds were divided into separate burial areas segregated by race, faith, and economic standing, with groups like Los Socios del Sementerio providing for migrant workers before integration came in the late 1960s. Now holding more than 60,000 graves—among them rock-and-roll pioneer Buddy Holly—it is one of Texas's largest cemeteries.

Eutaw, AL

First Baptist Church in Eutaw stood at the center of the Black Belt's civil rights struggle, a region where African American majorities had long been shut out of political power. During the 1960s the church hosted rallies and strategy sessions, and it welcomed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the final year of his life. Rural Alabama churches like this one served as sanctuaries, organizing halls, and staging grounds for the movement.

Valdosta, GA

This marker tells the story of the spark that lit the modern Civil Rights Movement: in December 1955, seamstress Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her bus seat, and Black community leaders answered with a boycott of the city's segregated buses. What began as a single day of protest stretched into a 381-day campaign coordinated by the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association, whose young pastor, Martin Luther King Jr., emerged as its voice. The cost was steep — organizers were arrested and King's own home was bombed — but the boycott's discipline and endurance proved that nonviolent mass action could break the machinery of segregation.

Groesbeck, TX

In August 1935, an all–African American unit, Civilian Conservation Corps Company 3807(C), began building a state park on the former town site of Springfield. Over nearly seven years the company cleared roads, poured a dam that created Lake Fort Parker, built picnic areas and a bathhouse, and reconstructed old Fort Parker in time for the 1936 Texas Centennial. Former Governor Pat Neff dedicated the finished park in 1941, and the company moved on in 1942 after a remarkable run of complex work.

Bastrop, TX

After Moses Gage bought land along Alum Creek in 1837, a small settlement known as Craft's Prairie grew up around his family in Bastrop County. When his son Sherly Gage died in 1850 he was buried on a rise above Little Alum Creek, and the Black, Rector, and Gage families—along with roughly thirty enslaved people in the site's southeast corner—filled the graveyard through the 1860s. Martha Jane Claiborne formally established the cemetery before her death in 1936, and a family association has cared for it since 1947.

Walker County, TX

Local tradition holds that this cemetery was established by deed in 1853 specifically so that people of mixed Native American and pioneer heritage—turned away from other burial grounds—would have a place of rest. The first known burial was Martha Johnston Andrews in 1860, and the cemetery grew alongside the nearby Pleasant Grove Baptist Church. Among its more than 500 graves lie early settlers of Scots-Irish ancestry and veterans of every war from the Civil War to Vietnam.

Orange, TX

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, raised in Orange amid a blend of Texan and Cajun cultures, built a recording career of more than fifty years on a restless refusal to stay in one genre. A master of guitar and fiddle, he moved from Houston R&B hits on Peacock Records through country, western swing, blues, and Cajun, winning a Grammy in 1982 and eight W.C. Handy awards. Evacuating Hurricane Katrina, he returned to Orange in 2005 and died there two weeks later.

Diboll vicinity, TX

Before bridges spanned the Neches, ferries were the vital links across East Texas rivers. I. D. Clark established this crossing in 1856, and after his death in 1859 his widow Ann kept it running with the labor of two enslaved people until her own death in 1863. The Clark family held the land for decades; a town called Clark's Station, or Miami, grew up at the crossing, with a community cemetery laid out nearby in 1860, until modern highways finally made the ferry obsolete.

Austin, TX

Clarksville took root in 1871 when Charles Clark, a newly freed man, bought two acres on Tenth Street and set out—so tradition holds—to build a community for his people on Austin's wooded outskirts. Life gathered around the Sweet Home Baptist Church, whose members famously greeted the dawn with hymns sung from their porches, and the freedom colony produced figures like legislator Elias Mayes and the Rev. Jacob Fontaine, who founded Austin's first Black newspaper. By the 1930s the fourth church building stood, anchoring a close-knit village of nine square blocks.

Manor, TX

In 1903 the Rev. Joseph E. Clayton took charge of Manor's first school for Black children and built it into something ambitious—pairing vocational and mechanical training with the study of languages, arts, and sciences. Absorbed into the public system in 1919 and named the Clayton Vocational Institute in his honor, the school produced a stream of distinguished graduates. Clayton himself went on to organize with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, carrying his fight for opportunity into the fields.

Cambridge, MA

Club 47 was a small Cambridge coffeehouse that became the beating heart of the early-1960s folk revival. On its stage Joan Baez and Bob Dylan sang duets, Muddy Waters brought the blues, and performers like Tom Rush and Eric Von Schmidt helped define a new acoustic sound. In just a few years it launched careers that would shape a generation of American music.

Houston, TX

Founded in 1896, College Memorial Park is among Houston's three oldest African American cemeteries, taking its name from the nearby Houston College and serving the freedmen's town that grew in the Fourth Ward after the Civil War. Here rest many of the community's founders—including the Rev. Jack Yates, who championed Black property ownership and was reinterred here from Olivewood—along with educators, veterans of both world wars, and participants in the 1917 Houston riot. Neglect and vandalism scarred the grounds before late-century efforts revived it as a site of heritage.

Austin, TX

This family burial ground was established by Newton Isaac Collins, Sr., who came out of slavery in Alabama and, after the Civil War, acquired land across eastern Travis County and founded the thriving community of Pilot Knob. The first known burial here was his son-in-law in 1894, and generations of the Collins and Bremond families followed, gathered around a monument to the community's founder. A small iron fence still encloses his memorial.

Quitman, TX

Erected in 1859–1860 by Mississippi settlers James and Harriet Collins, this was Wood County's first brick structure, its bricks molded and burned nearby and its furniture crafted in a plantation shop by Collins and enslaved workers. In the war years of 1861–1865, Confederate units marched past on their way to the front. The home has belonged to the Haines family since 1870.

Colmesneil, TX

By local tradition, African American residents of Colmesneil began burying their dead on this East Texas ground as early as the 1850s, with the oldest legible stone marking Henry Mitchell's 1859 death. For decades absentee landlords held the property before a 1930s owner secured its continued use. More than two hundred people rest here, among them ministers, doctors, teachers, railroad workers, and veterans of both World Wars, and in 1972 the ground was renamed Mount Zion after two associated Baptist churches.

Fannin, TX

Cologne was founded by formerly enslaved people seeking safety as Reconstruction gave way to renewed white political control and violence in Texas. Freedmen Joseph Smith and George Washington, who had built a prosperous freight and passenger business in Victoria, bought more than five hundred acres along Perdido Creek in 1877 and sold parcels to other Black families. The community built a cemetery, churches, a school, and a post office, and its economy grew when the railroad arrived in 1889—served, unusually for the era, by an integrated depot.

Xenia Township, OH

This was the Ohio home of Colonel Charles Young, one of the most distinguished African American soldiers of his era. Young was the third Black graduate of West Point and rose to become the highest-ranking Black officer in the U.S. Army, leading Buffalo Soldier cavalry and serving as an acting national park superintendent. His home near Wilberforce, a center of Black education, is preserved as a National Historic Landmark.

Hearne, TX

Now marked by a single surviving grave, this was a burial ground for African American residents of old Hearne, remembered in folklore as a farm or slave cemetery with its earliest known burial in 1879. When developers bought the land in 1947, descendants were forced to disinter and rebury their relatives—except the children of Hollie Tatnell, a formerly enslaved woman, who refused to move their mother's grave and compelled the builders to work around it.

Lexington, KY

Led by Mrs. E. Belle Mitchell Jackson, the Colored Orphan Industrial Home opened in Lexington in 1894 to shelter Black orphans and youth, who learned to read and write and acquired a trade, and it also gave refuge to elderly women. By 1909 the home had grown to 18 acres and two brick houses; after a fire in 1912, a new building was dedicated in 1913. That structure now serves as the Robert H. Williams Cultural Center.