Answers to Go with Susan Smith

Q. Where is the Antioch Colony?

A. The Antioch Colony is a Hays County community established in the 1870s by freed slaves. It is located off farm roads 967 and 1626 northwest of Buda.

In the “Handbook of Texas,” Laurie Jasinski writes: “Antioch Colony remained an active farming community into the 1930s and 1940s. Social life centered around the school and church, which had some 70 to 80 members. By the mid-1950s, however, most residents had moved away in search of better jobs. The community became almost a ghost town of ramshackle structures and overgrown homesteads.

In the late 1970s a few former residents returned to the area and bought back the land of their ancestors. Winnie Martha Moyer, a descendant of the Harper family, returned and was soon joined by other family members.

In 1997, residents established the Antioch Community Church, and in 1999 approximately 300 people attended the first Antioch Colony reunion. Local residents continued to maintain Antioch Cemetery located on Old Black Colony Road. By 2000 some 20 people, members of three extended families, lived in Antioch Colony. All were descendants of early settlers.

We have a remarkable Texas Department of Transportation document on life in Central Texas for African-Americans after the Civil War: “The Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead” by Boyd and Norment.

The authors write: “At first, many slaves set out on the roads and eventually found themselves in cities where they generally experienced a hardscrabble life; they found shelter in sheds, barns, alleys and vacant buildings. Others stayed on their home farms and plantations, sometimes for several years. After that, they often wandered from one farm to another, looking for work and often sharecropping, living in slave cabins left on the place.

“This type of life must have seemed like an extension of slavery, and after a few years in the fields, many rural blacks were drawn to towns and cities, where work possibilities were more diverse.

“Under these circumstances, many former slaves throughout the South, including Texas, banded together in small, independent settlements often on the periphery of established towns but also in rural settings at some distance from white communities. Called freedmen colonies, or freedom colonies, such enclaves offered support and defense for many freed slaves in the years following emancipation.

“In the country, freedmen colonies were often settled by the former slaves of a common master. As a result, the members were often related to one another by blood or marriage and had existing familial and societal bonds. These ties strengthened the community and furthered its common goals, such as establishing churches and schools.

“Rural colonies such as these consisted of small, adjacent parcels of land with one or two log houses to shelter extended families. Virtually all adults who had grown up in rural communities were experienced farmers and stock raisers, and in these new communities they typically practiced subsistence-level farming and animal husbandry, augmented by growing cotton as a cash crop.

“Permanent, stable freedmen colonies were based on landownership within the community. Land represented self-determination and an ability to provide for themselves and their families rather than return to virtual servitude as sharecroppers under their former slave masters.

“The mere acquisition of land by men and women who could not read or write and who had few possessions beyond the clothes on their backs was no small achievement. Some were assisted by their former masters, but most worked at odd jobs or as farm laborers for several years before they saved enough money to buy small parcels of land.

“In Hays County, some were hampered by laws that prevented land sales to blacks. Despite such obstacles, nearly one-fourth of African American farmers in the South succeeded in buying their own land between 1870 and 1880.

“In Texas, the increase in landownership among freedmen was extraordinary; in 1870, five years out of slavery, only 1.8 percent of the state’s black farmers owned land, but by 1890, an amazing 26 percent achieved landownership. Black landownership in Texas continued to increase and peaked at 31 percent just after the turn of the century.” --

Source: “The Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead” by Boyd and Norment, pages 58-59.