Everyone in Blooming Grove knew him as Kildee. When he died in April 1961, most of the town learned for the first time that he had another name. The Dallas paper called him John Ingram.¹ His stone at Rose Hill reads Floyd Ingram (Kildee), July 4, 1882 – April 22, 1961.²

He was born at Fairfield, and his parents had been enslaved.³ In 1914 he was a porter at a hotel in Teague, paid a dollar a week, when he was recruited to come to Blooming Grove and pick cotton.⁴ A year later he was custodian at the bank, and within a few weeks they gave him a key, which he was proud of for the rest of his life.⁵ In 1916 he set up a shoe-shine chair in the barber shop, and he worked it until he died.⁶ He liked to say he was one of Blooming Grove's oldest business institutions.⁷

He was very tall and very thin. He was a steward in his Methodist church, went to PTA and belonged to a lodge.⁸ In 1959 the school yearbook put him in the First State Bank's advertisement.⁹

A man who grew up in Blooming Grove remembers that Kildee always had a smile, kept a penny for any child who wanted a gumball from the machine in the barber shop, and took children by the hand to walk them across the street downtown.¹⁰

About 1958 he went to see Ditt McCormick, the undertaker and a former county judge, to arrange his own funeral.¹¹ On Saturday, April 22, 1961, after a visit to his doctor in Corsicana, he died in the car.¹²

He was laid out in McCormick's parlor, and more than half the town came by. The funeral was held at his own church, Tyree Chapel A.M.E.¹³ His pastor, the Rev. Z. V. Jones, spoke, and so did the mayor, Sam Carroll. Three white men and three Black men carried the casket.¹⁴

The plan had been to bury him at Pruitt Cemetery, east of town, where Blooming Grove's Black families buried their dead.¹⁵ Instead he was buried at Rose Hill, in the newest part of what was then the white cemetery.¹⁶ Asked by a Dallas reporter whether there had been any protest, McCormick said: “Not a word.”¹⁷ His grave sits apart, at the edge of the cemetery, with the main rows behind it. As one visitor put it in 2018, he was buried there, “but not with them.”¹⁸

The Dallas Morning News carried the story twice, in April and again in June. Letters reached McCormick from as far away as Alabama, and the NAACP in Dallas wrote the mayor a two-page letter of respect.¹⁹ Buster Warren and Loyd Simpson, whose barber shop held his chair, and Drew Gillen, whose family lot lies thirty feet from his grave, put up a monument and a concrete coping.²⁰ The R. W. George estate, which had given the land for that part of the cemetery, offered more ground beside it for other Black families.²¹

The reporter found one man who objected. He asked Kildee's pastor whether there would be Black people in Heaven, and when Jones said there would, the man said he would not care to go. Jones told him: “Well, sir, there'll be a bunch of Negro people in the other place, too.”²²

Kildee's church stood on the west side of town, in what was then called colored town. The 1921 Sanborn fire-insurance map shows three of its institutions within two blocks of each other:²³ a Methodist church on Second Street, most likely Tyree Chapel; a Baptist church on Third; and, across Third at Carruthers, a school for Black children, heated by stoves and with no electric lights.

The Baptist church is Olive Grove. The Rev. Edmond Blanford, born enslaved in Alabama about 1832, came to Texas about 1866 and organized it in 1871, the year Gradyville became Blooming Grove. He named it for his daughter Olive and for the town, and he was its pastor until he died in 1920.²⁴ The 1930 tornado lifted the church off its blocks and set it down two feet to the north.²⁵ In 1986 it was the only church in Blooming Grove still meeting in its original building, and it still stands on West Third Street.²⁶

Verna Dean Nelson's family moved into colored town in 1930. She remembered her teachers: Mrs. Curtis, Archie Bonnet, and Prof. Trailor, who took his pupils to the white school to sing gospel songs. Then the school burned, and her class finished the year in Chestler Monroe's grocery store.²⁷ On the 1934 map the school at Carruthers is gone, and a new one stands farther east along Third.²⁸ Later, she said, the school was where the public housing is now, by the fire station, and Prof. Jones taught there until the schools integrated.²⁹

Pruitt Cemetery, also called the Blanford-Gowan-Majors cemetery, lies east of town down a gravel road, in a cedar thicket on private land.³⁰ Edmond Blanford is buried there. So are four men who served in the First World War, and Collie Frost, who died in service in 1944.³¹ Many of its graves have no stone.

Some in Blooming Grove remember a gathering at Kildee's grave in recent years. If you were there, or if you know the history of the west side, its churches and its school, it belongs here.