Freedom Communities in Austin

Frank Strain Family, photograph, Date Unknown;  https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth17366/m1/1/ , University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History,  https://texashistory.unt.edu ; crediting Jacob Fontaine Religious Museum

At the close of the Civil War, newly emancipated Blacks — eager to exercise some sense of independence, self-determination, and self-reliance — took a bold step to minimize the control over their lives by Whites. Between 1865 and 1900, the freedmen formed settlements, communities, towns, and municipalities across the south, particularly in Texas. These residential enclaves featured proud landowners who built homes for family and kin groups. Given the strong religious orientation of the populace, most established churches. They also founded schools, an indication of their desire for formal education that had been denied them during slavery.

Many of the freedmen communities were established in and around Austin. The newly emancipated people who migrated to the city or to the nearby black communities were fleeing the lawlessness they saw in the rural South. In this setting, it is likely that freedmen already in the urban environment served as mentors for the new arrivals who had to adjust to city life.

According to the  Texas Freedom Colonies Project,  over 557 settlements were founded in Texas. In historic parlance, these were called freedmen's towns or colonies, but the reliance on one another in social networks and the desire to be together as free people created community.

Freedmen Communities of Austin and Surrounding Areas web map was created using  "The Early Freedman Communities"  map by the Austin History Center as a starting point to create the boundaries of the more well-known Freedmen communities. Other boundaries were created using the descriptions provided by "And Grace Will Lead Me Home" by Michelle M. Mears, "Reckoning with the Past" by Rowena Houghton Dasch and Tara Dudley, and the  Texas Freedom Colonies Project . All boundaries are approximations of where the communities are/used to be.

Urban communities were developed adjacent to the city center where the economy was interdependent with the city residents and businesses, rather than rural farming and ranching communities which were more self-reliant. Many of these communities are presently only marked by their cemeteries.

Barton Springs area included a rural freedom community established near the former Goodrich plantation’s slave cemetery. Barton Springs Baptist Church was an active Black church until the 1960s, however, the original structure is lost to time as it burned down in the 1940s. In 1993, the church and cemetery received a historic designation for its role in South Austin’s African American history.

Given that Clarksville persists as a neighborhood in modern central Austin, it is perhaps the most well-known freedom community. However, its modern iteration is denser and smaller due to the development of Mopac Expressway which took hundreds of homes. Local community members fight to maintain Clarksville's character and honor its history, as seen by the Clarksville Community Development Corporation that provides low cost housing to entice former residents. Charles Griffin Clark established Clarksville in 1871 near the former Woodlawn Plantation, owned by the two-term Texas governor E.M. Pease. Clarksville was not initially part of Austin, but became absorbed by the city once White neighborhoods began surrounding the freedom community. Many Clarksville residents worked as farmers. Clarksville had an in-house school with several dozen students in the late nineteenth century, many of the children had to work in the fields for over half of the year. In 1917, the Clarksville Colored School was established. White encroachment on Clarksville has been an existential threat for over a century, but Clarksville's historical significance was officially recognized in the National Register of Historic Places.

Established in 1880, Gregorytown was one of the last urban freedman communities to be formed in East Austin, and is believed to be named after an early resident, Reverend Daniel Gregory. Residents worked clerical, service, farming and industrial jobs in the cotton mill industry around the train hub along east 5th Street. Gregorytown families who attended Wesley Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church organized a two-room Sunday school for children in their community. The new Gregorytown Sunday school became a safer and nearby alternative to the downtown Austin location of the Wesley Chapel church and school. This led to the establishment of a new church, Simpson Mission Methodist Episcopal, located near the corner of Concho and Gregory Street. By 1894, a Gregorytown school was built at 1712 East Eleventh Street, offering junior high, high school, and college preparatory classes to African American students. The boundaries include present-day Rosewood Ave to the north, Comal Street to the west, Seventh Street to the south, and Chicon Street to the east, and included the site of Tillotson College, the first institute of higher education for African Americans in Austin, which would later merge into Huston-Tillotson University in the same location. To read more about the history of Huston-Tillotson University, see the exhibit To Elevate here.

As a freedom community, Horst’s Pasture was short lived, without a Black school or church on the record. It was established on the former Horst Plantation, owned by German immigrant Louis Horst. Horst’s Pasture was likely a freedmen’s encampment from about 1865 to 1885, and even after its dissipation, the land stayed undeveloped for decades. In the history of Jacob Fontaine's churches, religious meetings were held on this land until a church could be built.

Pictured above is a map of the land owned by Louis Horst that would form the basis of Horst's Pasture. According to his obituary published in the Daily Democratic Statesmen, he attained a good deal of wealth after settling in Austin from his plantation and business deals.

In 1867, Sam Mason Jr. and his brother, Raiford Mason, purchased property in the area that would become Masontown, although four years later the Houston and Texas Central Railroad would bisect the freedom community in two. Masontown would then become a bustling hub for industry related to the railroad, with both Black and White stone masons, millers, and lumbermen working in the rail yards and freight depot. Freedmen who settled in Masontown came from as far away as Tennessee, Mississippi, and Georgia. There were plenty of other jobs that African Americans in Masontown held, including working as gardeners, carpenters, and bricklayers. At one time the community had two Baptist churches and as many as 200 residents.

Pleasant Hill was one of the earliest freedom communities located close to the French Legation upon a hill. It developed east of Waller Creek and was roughly bounded by E. 11th Street, E. 7th Street, and San Marcos Street. Beginning as an encampment, it evolved into a small community with several dozen small frame houses and hand-dug wells. 

One of the freedom communities without a formal name is the Red River Street community, developed by freedman Jeremiah J. Hamilton through his construction of Hamilton House on the corner of the Eponymous Street. This community was served by two Black churches: the First Baptist Church, and the older Wesley Chapel M.E. Church. Close by the Red River Street community was East Sixth Street, which was the most prominent African American business district in Austin from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century. As commerce began to move away from East Sixth Street starting around 1888, this freedom community also began to decline.

George L. Robertson’s subdivision around the French Legation property would become the roots of the Robertson Hill freedom community. It began as a racially diverse neighborhood including freedmen, White Americans and European immigrants. Bounded by East 13th, Rosewood, Leona and East 7th streets, Robertson Hill was the second freedmen town in the area north of East 7th Street. Robertson Hill was adjacent to the Swedish Hill Neighborhood. The first person to buy property in the newly-platted Robertson Hill subdivision was a freedman named Malick Wilson, who purchased a lot on East 11th between Curve and Waller streets in 1869. The modern area of Robertson Hill has many of Austin’s historic Black churches but few of the batten board houses from its days as a freedom community remain. This is the area where Samuel Houston College was founded. Read more about the HBC's history in To Elevate.

This freedom community located near Shoal Creek lacked its own name, but was a bustling African American community in its own right with a Black church, Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, and a school. Shoal Creek's freedom community was a racially diverse neighborhood, however the wealth stratification by race was evident by the list of professions held by its residents. However, the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church moved to East Austin in 1927, and the freedom community dissipated, with all visual evidence of its existence having vanished among new developments.

South Side was a tenacious freedom community established around the area of the former Bouldin Plantation, which would persist through the 1928 municipal master plan that intended to move all African Americans into East Austin. South Side had two churches: the Friendly Will Baptist Church and St. Annie Methodist, along with a school built in 1901. Over time, the South Side neighborhood gradually stopped existing as a freedom community as it became more integrated.

James Wheat, a freedman, founded the community with his family in 1867. In 1869, he bought property in the area that would become Wheatville. The residents of Wheatville had a variety of jobs, such as construction workers, merchants, domestic workers, and blacksmiths. The Franzetti building was the heart of the community in Wheatville, built by freedman and carpenter George Franklin in 1869.   Jacob Fontaine , a prominent Baptist minister, settled at Wheatville in the late 1860s. In 1887, the Reverend Jacob Fontaine founded New Hope Baptist Church in Wheatville. Fontaine’s legacy in Austin extended much farther than just the boundaries of Wheatville, which you can read about in the exhibit, To Believe. By 1881, Wheatville had its own school, later led by well-known Black educator, W.H. Passon, as its principal. While Wheatville’s location modern day location is now urban and developed, this was not the case at its height as a freedom community in the late nineteenth century.

 Retelling Central Texas History  project by Dr. Edmund T. Gordon created a GIS map of locations in Wheatville to help document its history:

Belle Hill was founded by two freedmen families in 1870, Jackson and Wood, and the community contained a few businesses. A scarlet fever epidemic in 1916 wiped out the community, leaving behind only a small cemetery where burials are present, surrounded by new commercial and residential developments in the area of the old Motorola plant.

Burditt’s Prairie was founded around the same area of the former Burditt Plantation slave cemetery. It contained both a school and a church, with church services held in the home of the freedman Rosa Edwards, although there is no trace left of either of these structures. The community cemetery still exists.

In 1869, Thomas Kincheon bought the farmland that would become Kincheonville, where it was then seven miles southwest of Austin’s boundaries. Kinchenoville was notable as a rural freedom community for containing a number of Hispanic and White settlers alongside the many Black settlers. The founder's grandson, Thomas Kincheon Sr., began to sell some of his inherited land for new residential developments. By the 1950s, it had dissipated as a rural African American community because of the land sales. Its last remaining mark are the streets that Kincheon named after his children.

Henry Warnell, freedman who fought at the Alamo, purchased over 100 acres of land at Pilot Knob in 1891, which would become a small freedom community. In the early 1900s, Dee Gabriel Collins purchased more land in and around Pilot Knob, many acres of which are still owned by his descendants. An elementary school was named in honor of one of the Collins family, Newton Collins, a freedman carpenter. A cemetery exists there for the community.

Reyna Branch is a little known southeastern rural freedom community with multiple spellings in city records, its existence marked by a single school for African Americans. By 1926, the school’s name changed to Bluff Springs and thus disappeared all references to a Reyna Branch. The only possible existing figment of this freedom community is the nearby Rinard Creek, spinning off of its many differing spellings. There exists remnants of the community cemetery.

In 1867, Reverend Jacob Fontaine helped found a group of Black Baptist churches, which started as 12 churches in Travis County, which expanded to over 300 churches in a multi-county organization renamed the St. John Missionary Baptist Association. Through this social network, the St. John Community formed after the Association was able to purchase 303 acres of land in 1894. They held annual camp revivals during the month of July, and built a church, orphanage and school. The Oakwood Chapel's exhibit To Believe includes more of the history of the St. John Community.

Recently emancipated African Americans were experiencing a period of great transition. The year 1865 witnessed an end of the Civil War; General Order No. 3 led to freedom celebrations called Juneteenth; and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution provided Black men the right to vote. The new electors sent freedmen to the state legislature. The recently emancipated also formed social and civic organizations that opposed the virulent racism of the Reconstruction Era, fought a range of “Jim Crow” racial restrictions, and campaigned for their social, political, and economic well-being. Now African Americans were imagining a society they wished to build for themselves and future generations.

The late nineteenth century brought forth a sense of promise, a cautious optimism for a people in the middle of profound social change. Black athletes participated in the nation’s favorite pastime, baseball, but within segregated contexts. Many embraced emerging Pan-African sentiments. Legal challenges to racial discrimination showed glimmers of promise. People continued to celebrate “Freedom Day” on church grounds and on privately purchased lands called Emancipation Parks. Not surprisingly, music registered the roar of change, self-discovery, and new possibilities.