Bear Creek Community

In 1949 fire destroyed the community school, then part of the county system as Sowers Colored School No. 2. Residents raised money for a new building, found it badly under-resourced, and asked the county for help. When the request was refused, they picketed for fair funding with NAACP help. The school joined the Irving district in 1955, which began integrating in 1966. In 1964 residents formed the Bear Creek Improvement Association to press for civil rights and annexation, granted in 1969. Jackie Mae Howard of Bear Creek became the first Black woman on the Irving City Council in 1977.

What the plaque says

Bear Creek Community Settlers began arriving in this area, once a part of Robertson's Colony, in the 1850s. Early families included the Casters, Borahs, Sowers and Haleys. Following the Civil War, freedmen moved to the area, and friends and families once separated by slavery were reconnected. Jim Green, the first African American landowner in what became known as the Bear Creek community, bought his acreage in 1878. Others soon followed: Jim Chivers, Ben and Rose Dilworth, Alex King, Elizabeth Lawson, Collins and Rachel Patton, D.W. Ellison (Ellerson), Sam Sweat, the Trigg family and Minnie Shelton (Sheldon), who later donated land for Shelton's Bear Creek Cemetery. These families organized the Shady Grove Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in 1884, erecting a one-room church and school building on land donated by Jim Green. The congregation, which built a larger structure in 1897, continued to grow and worship together throughout the 20th century. The Bear Creek community school, known as Freedom School, began as a private education facility. The students later transferred to Grand Prairie's Dal Worth School, which became County Colored School No. 2. It, along with schools from the Sowers community, were annexed to the Irving Independent School District in 1955. Early teachers in the Bear Creek settlement included Josie Davis and Earlie Mae Wheeler. Approximately 150 years after the first settlers came to the area, the once rural Bear Creek settlement is experiencing rapid growth from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and related highway and airport expansion. Shelton's Bear Creek Cemetery is one of few links to the settlement and the lives of the families who contributed over the years to the community. (2004)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 12 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 12 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 13 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 13 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.

More markers nearby

• Daniel Webster Gilbert, M. D. — 1.1 mi
• Sowers Cemetery — 1.1 mi
• Shady Grove Cemetery — 1.5 mi
• City of Irving — 2.7 mi