Freeman Farm

The National Register of Historic Places listing of June 12, 2000, also calls the property the Freeman Plantation and Kickapoo Farm, and counts two contributing buildings, four structures and one object. Enslaved people worked the plantation alongside the Freemans. The Kickapoo of the farm's name was a community on Kickapoo Creek, named for the Kickapoo people, with a post office by 1850. Texas Escapes says it had about 100 residents by the mid-1880s, and that when the railroad went through Frankston in 1900 many moved there. The post office closed in 1905.

What the plaque says

Freeman Farm William Franklin Freeman (1827 - 1892) and Elizabeth Ann Davis (1829 - 1856) were married in Alabama in 1846. After the birth of their first child in 1849 they came to Texas and settled two miles south of Kickapoo in Anderson County. They purchased land for a farm and in the 1850s built a homestead using hand-hewn lumber and bricks made at the site. The Freemans were successful farmers and owned more than 3,000 acres of land. The plantation was self-sustaining and was operated by the Freemans and the slaves they acquired. Tasks were completed in additional buildings located here including a blacksmith shop, an icehouse, cotton gin, syrup mill, smokehouse, and chicken house. They produced their own clothing and shoes using a spinning wheel, shoe forms and a cobbler's bench. Much of the furniture was produced locally including wardrobes, tables, chairs, pie safes and desks. The plantation served the Kickapoo area as a local post office. W. F. Freeman functioned as county commissioner in 1876, and as president of Kickapoo College in the 1880s. After his death, his second wife Bethena Oldham (1841 - 1904) managed the farm for many years. Their family continues to be active in civic affairs. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Railroad Excursion Train — 18 mi
  A round trip of about 25 miles of track between the Palestine and Rusk depots through the Piney Woods, on a line built by prison labor and reopened as a tourist railroad in 1976.
• Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center — 22 mi
  A Texas Parks and Wildlife hatchery and visitor center in Athens where visitors can borrow tackle and fish a stocked pond, watch native species in gallery tanks and ride a tram around the hatchery.
• Tyler Rose Garden and Rose Museum — 27 mi
  More than 38,000 rose bushes of about 600 cultivars in a free city garden, beside a museum of the Texas Rose Festival, which began in 1933, and of the rose industry.

More markers nearby

• Site of the Kickapoo Battlefield — 2.3 mi
• Frankston City Park — 4.1 mi
• Cuney — 5.4 mi
• First Gravesite of Cynthia Ann Parker — 6.8 mi