Address: Multiple sites across Austin and Travis County — see “The Communities” below\nHours: Always open (individual sites vary)\nCost: Free
\nBetween 1865 and the 1880s, formerly enslaved Texans founded at least sixteen separate freedom communities in and around Austin, building churches, schools, and farms from nothing on the land no one else wanted. A single 1928 city planning document erased most of them; a handful survived, and one — Clarksville — is now one of the city’s most sought-after addresses.
\nEmancipation in Texas didn’t come with land. Formerly enslaved families across Travis County had to find ground to settle on, and what was available was almost always marginal: creek bottoms prone to flooding, the edges of plantations whose owners no longer needed resident labor, pasture nobody else had claimed. Out of that constraint, at least sixteen distinct communities took shape in and around Austin between 1865 and the 1880s — Clarksville, Wheatville, Robertson Hill, Pleasant Hill, Masontown, Gregorytown, Horst’s Pasture, Southside, Shoal Creek, Kincheonville, Red River Street, Burditt, Waller Creek, Barton Springs, Pilot Knob, and St. John Colony (technically in Caldwell County, but founded by families with deep Travis County ties). A few were named for a founder — Charles Clark, James Wheat, Sam Mason, Thomas Kincheon — and a few for the land they sat on; most no longer correspond to any neighborhood a modern Austinite would recognize.
\nThe pattern repeats across nearly every one of them. A congregation organizes first, frequently meeting in a founder’s home before the community can afford its own building — Sweet Home Baptist in Mary Smith’s house in Clarksville, Barton Springs Baptist next to the old Goodrich plantation cemetery, St. Edward’s Missionary Baptist near Burditt’s Prairie. A school follows once there are enough children and enough stability to support one, almost always underfunded and often the first thing the city cut when it wanted a community gone. Outside of the church and the school, these communities had few institutions of their own and little formal protection — they existed because the land was cheap and the city didn’t care to interfere, not because the city had agreed to let them stay.
\nThat tolerance had a clock on it. As Austin grew, land that had been worthless when freedpeople settled it became valuable, and the city’s appetite for integrated neighborhoods (such as they were) shrank. Wheatville’s school closed in 1932 and the community had “virtually vanished” within a few years. Shoal Creek dissolved when its anchor church relocated to East Austin in 1927. Horst’s Pasture, lacking even a church or school to hold it together, disappeared so completely that it wasn’t identified as a former freedom community until 1986, and then only through the memory of an elderly resident. The 1928 Koch & Fowler Master Plan gave this slow erosion a name and a method: official policy now directed Black residents and Black city services into East Austin, and the city enforced it by withholding utilities from anyone who didn’t move. Some communities, like Clarksville, refused to fully comply and kept independent schools and churches running for decades afterward; most didn’t have the numbers or the standing to resist at all.
\nA few communities escaped erasure by accident of geography or family persistence rather than city policy. Pilot Knob survived because the Alexander and Collins families held onto their land outright — descendants still farm part of the original tract today, recognized by the Texas Family Land Heritage Program. St. John Colony survived in part because it was never inside Austin’s city limits to begin with. Kincheonville and Burditt held on long enough to be absorbed, gradually and on their own terms, into modern Austin’s southern suburbs. And Clarksville, protected first by its distance from downtown and later by a 1976 National Register listing, survived the era that erased its neighbors — only to be remade again by gentrification once its history became a selling point. (Clarksville’s fuller story, including the Haskell House and Sweet Home Baptist Church, has its own entry: [[Clarksville]].)
\nWhat’s left to see is mostly churches, a couple of cemeteries, and a small number of surviving buildings: the Franzetti Building in Wheatville, the Hamilton-built structure now inside Symphony Square (shared by the Red River Street and Waller Creek communities), and Clarksville’s Haskell House. RISE ATX, a public history project, has done the most recent work consolidating the archival record — including Mears’s research and the county settlement survey — into a single accessible map of all sixteen communities, several of which have since received Official Texas Historical Markers.
\n