Acres Homes Community

The plaque gives the Acres Homes Transit Company one line; Roger Townsend Ward's Handbook entry fills it in. The Yale Street Bus Line stopped serving the community in the fall of 1958, and residents fell back on jitneys, used cars run as taxis by neighbors in open violation of the city's transport codes. Teachers, ministers, businessmen and civic leaders petitioned city hall and won a state charter, and on July 1, 1959 the council granted a temporary permit. Four buses made forty-three round trips a day. After annexation, the board sold the company in June 1968 for $5,000.

What the plaque says

Acres Homes Community In 1910, land developer Alfred A. Wright platted the first of several subdivisions that eventually became the African American community of Acres Homes. Wright sold parcels of varying sized to residents who were attracted to the rural area by the inexpensive land, low taxes, and the absense of building restrictions, as well as the slow-paced life and wide-open spaces of rural living. Despite the lack of common municipal services such as electricity, street lights, garbage disposal, sewer and water, Acres Homes flourished as a self-contained community. In 1957, Negro Life magazine described Acres Homes as the "largest all-negro community in the United States." By 1974, the community extended roughly from West Tidwell to Gulfbank and from North Shepherd to White Oak Bayou and DuBoise. The residents included farmers, laborers, factory workers, "waterfront" workers and domestics who commuted to work in other parts of town.The first Church, Galilee Missionary Baptist, was organized in 1913, and the first school, White Oak Colored, opened in 1915. From the 1930s through the 1950s, a large migration of settlers moved into the area, organizing civic clubs and building homes, churches, Masonic halls and businesses. The first dry goods store, drug store and post office opened in 1945. The first black-owned bus company in the south, the Acres Homes Transit Company, operated from 1959 until 1968.Integration and the gradual annexation of Acres Homes by the City of Houston from 1967 to 1974 brought population diversity and transformation to Acres Homes. However, Acres Homes continues to retain its strong community identity and civic pride. (2008)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 7.9 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• The Menil Collection — 8.9 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Rothko Chapel — 8.9 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 9.3 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Greater Ward A.M.E. Church — steps away
• Galilee Missionary Baptist Church — 0.3 mi
• Jackson's Barber Shop & Beauty Salon — 3.8 mi
• James D. Burrus Elementary School — 4.0 mi