Antioch Colony

Many of the freedmen who settled here came from Missouri, and they named the community, also known as Black Colony, for the Turkish city of Antioch. Ten to fifteen families lived here in the early 1870s, among them the Buntons, Champs, Harpers, Beards, Taylors and Kavanaughs. They raised corn and other grains, cotton and sugarcane, and mule-powered mills ground corn and made sorghum molasses. Telephone and electric service came only after most residents had left. Winnie Martha Moyer, a Harper descendant, returned in the late 1970s, and about 300 people attended the first reunion in 1999.

What the plaque says

Antioch Colony was a rural farming community formed after the Civil War by a group of formerly enslaved African Americans. Although freed from slavery after the Civil War, African Americans still found it difficult to purchase land. In 1859, Anglo businessman Joseph F. Rowley purchased 490 acres in north Hays County, along Onion Creek. He began selling parcels to former slaves in 1870 at $5.00 per acre. Rowley, perhaps in an effort to protect the new landowners from losing their property, indicated in many of the deeds that the African American owners could not sell the property without Rowley's consent. After moving to Missouri, Rowley rescinded the stipulation in 1893 but the document was not filed in Hays County until 1913. Community residents Elias and Clarisa Bunton donated property for a community school and church in 1874, and the building served as the school until 1939. The following year, the school was relocated to Black Colony Road and served Antioch until students were integrated into the Buda school system in 1961. A Baptist church and a Methodist church were organized in the community, and there was also an active Masonic lodge and Order of the Eastern Star chapter in Antioch. Antioch remained an active farm community through the 1930s and 1940s. By the 1950s, many residents had moved away in search of better employment opportunities and the community was virtually abandonded. Beginning in the 1970s former residents and their descendants began returning to Antioch, some purchasing the land that their ancestors had previously owned, and the community continues to grow. (2009)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• McKinney Falls State Park — 10 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• Barton Springs Pool — 13 mi
  A three-acre pool in the bed of Barton Creek, fed by the fourth-largest spring in Texas at 68 to 70 degrees, and shared with an endangered salamander found almost nowhere else.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 14 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 14 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.

More markers nearby

• Buda — 0.5 mi
• Barton Cemetery — 2.2 mi
• Manchaca United Methodist Church — 3.9 mi
• Goforth — 5.4 mi