After emancipation, freedpeople across Texas got hold of land of their own, often poor land at the edge of the white towns, and built a church, a school and a cemetery on it. Historians call these places freedom colonies.¹ The Texas Freedom Colonies Project counts eleven in Navarro County: Babylon, Brushy Prairie, Elm Flat, Goodlow, Pelham, Philips, Rural Shade, Samaria, Timothy, Union Hill and Vann.²

The one that is still a community sits on FM 744, a mile from the Hill County line, north-west of Dawson. Black families began settling there after 1866, where Ash, White Rock and Richland Creeks came together, and for years the place was simply Forks of the Creek.³ A 1966 county history lists the families in the order they came: Westbrook in 1866, Sneed in 1867, the Rev. Holmes and Henry Carruthers in 1870, Moses Stanford in 1873, Dave Henry in 1881, Tom Cook in 1890.⁴ A post office opened in 1898, and the postmaster's wife named it Pelham, after Pelham, Alabama. By 1926 about three hundred and fifty people lived there.⁵

The churches came first. Wesley Chapel Methodist was organized at the forks in 1877 and moved up near the cemetery in 1890. Brown Chapel A.M.E. followed in 1905, and Union Baptist in 1916.⁶

School began inside Wesley Chapel in 1899. In 1908 the community built a two-story schoolhouse, and in 1921 the trustees bought three acres for a new one, paid for in part by the Rosenwald Fund, the program started by the president of Sears, Roebuck that helped build some five thousand schools for Black children across the South.⁷ Ash Creek School taught twelve grades. The high school closed in 1965, and in 1968 the last of its students went to Dawson.⁸

In the 1960s the forks themselves went under Navarro Mills Lake.⁹ The cemetery is still there, kept by an association that has looked after it since the 1930s. Its earliest marked grave is Isaac Franklin's, from 1880.¹⁰ The community keeps a museum in an 1890 building, and four state markers stand for its church, its school, its cemetery and the town.¹¹

The others are harder to find. Union Hill is a cemetery about five miles south of Frost, near the Hill County line.¹² Brushy Prairie, a couple of miles north of Pelham, had a Black school of fifty-four pupils in 1906; after the Second World War its children went to school in Frost.¹³ Babylon, between Dawson and Purdon, was founded about 1895 by people who had been enslaved, and they named their church Babylon, after the city of exile. By the early 1990s it was a few scattered houses.¹⁴

East of Corsicana, Goodlow did something none of the others did. When Kerens declined to annex it, the community incorporated on its own, in 1978, and it is a town today.¹⁵

A Pelham resident told a researcher in 2013 what had become of the rest: “Babylon, no more. Bethel, no more. Round Prairie's about gone. Porter's Bluff, it's gone.”¹⁶

Blooming Grove's Black neighborhood was on the west side of town. The 1921 and 1934 Sanborn fire-insurance maps show its institutions there.¹⁷ One is a Baptist church, today Olive Grove, founded in 1871 by the Rev. Edmond Blanford, who was born enslaved in Alabama.¹⁸ There is also a Methodist church, likely Tyree Chapel A.M.E., and a school for Black children. The community buried its dead at Pruitt Cemetery, east of town.¹⁹ If you know more of that history, it belongs here.