Freedom's Ground & What the Lake Covered

The history of this country is usually told through the men who held the land grants. It is also the history of people who worked the land without owning it, and who, once free, set out to own some of it themselves.

In 1861, Navarro County voted 213 to 3 to leave the Union. That year the county counted 1,920 enslaved people. Most of their names do not appear in the histories we have read. Annie Carpenter Love wrote in 1933 that runaways often hid in the Richland Creek and Chambers Creek bottoms. Near Purdon, the state marker at Younger Cemetery records that from about 1860, the ground beside it, now known as Woodward Cemetery, was used for the burial of enslaved people.

In 1866, newly freed people settled a place to the west they called Forks of the Creek. It became Pelham, and its Wesley United Methodist Church, founded in 1878, housed the town's first school.

To the east, on Richland Creek bottomland, former slaves built Birdston Valley after the Civil War. Its state marker records a community of farmers and a church, Goodwill Baptist, organized between 1876 and 1883, whose first pastor was Isom J. Collins. The community's Masonic lodge, organized in 1907, first met in a cotton gin Collins owned. Its two-story lodge hall later doubled as the schoolhouse.

Babylon lay midway between Dawson and Purdon. The Handbook of Texas says former slaves founded it around 1895, when they built a church and named it for the biblical city. A 1966 account in The Navarro County Scroll tells it through its people. In that account, Peter Hopkins gave an acre for a school and a Methodist church. The families of Allie Carroll, Noah Melton, Ed Welch and Shad Washington lived along Post Oak Creek, a branch of Richland Creek. Louis Cunningham bought 194 acres north of Richland Creek, and Mary Etta Cunningham is credited with the name. Babylon never had a post office or a store. After World War II most families left, and by the 1990s only a few scattered houses remained.

A history of Purdon written in the 1990s remembers a woman named Tennie Fulcher. It says that "home to her was on her land in the country near Richland creek," and that at least once a week she drove her wagon and team into Purdon for her mail and supplies. Her son, it adds, later built his own home near the original site of the Black community church. That is nearly all we have found about her. We would like to know more, and to tell it right.

To the east lies Richland-Chambers Reservoir. Building began in 1982, and the lake was full by 1989. Before the water came, SMU archaeologists recorded 194 historic sites in the basin, dating from about 1840 to 1940. They included log cabins, the houses of what the archaeologists called frontier plantations along Richland Creek, tenant farms and a brick kiln. The same team dated the end of the old farm way of life here to the mid-1930s, when roads and electric lines arrived, followed by the Depression and the war. We have not found a list of the communities, roads or cemeteries the lake covered.

In 2009, boaters found human remains on the lake shore. In the drought of 2011, falling water uncovered 25 children's graves. Square-cut coffin nails suggested burials from before 1890. The adult bones were 100 to 120 years old and, the Associated Press reported, "consistent with" a man of African descent, though that was never conclusively established. Some believe the graves belong to people freed from slavery who stayed on as sharecroppers. The Navarro County Historical Commission asked that the dead be reburied in the county. We have not found a public record of where they rest now. We do not say where the graves were found, and we ask that no one go looking.