Globe Hill Community and Baptist Church

The plaque names Jones Colony only as a source of Globe Hill's pupils, but it was an older freedmen's settlement. The brothers Abram, Alexander, George and Philip Jones founded it sometime between the end of the Civil War and 1875, and its people farmed and ranched. In 1908 the county apportioned school funds for twenty-four Jones Colony students before they moved to the Globe Hill school. The colony peaked at fifty or sixty residents around 1910 and had Baptist and Methodist churches; by 2000 only its church and cemetery marked the place.

What the plaque says

Globe Hill Community and Baptist Church George Coleman Truitt, founder of this predominantly African American community, bought land in the area and built at least nine box houses for his tenant farmers. Truitt also ran the community's only business, a general store. In 1887, Truitt and Simon P. Davis selected a school site on a rocky promontory called Rocky Hill, for which Truitt named the community. He later renamed it Globe Hill. Truitt donated the land for the school and later provided the site for the cemetery. The schoolhouse, completed in November 1887, was also used for church services. The first teacher was Julia Donovan. In the spring of 1889, it was enlarged to accommodate the growing student population. By 1908, students from Jones Colony and the Joseph and Margaret Dockery settlement began transferring to the Globe Hill school and enrollment increased to forty-six students. The school was replaced in the early 1920s with a four-room Rosenwald School which was later annexed and moved to the Post Oak School in 1954. The Globe Hill Baptist Church was formed and organized by the community in 1912. An educator and reverend, Frank Ruffin, became the first pastor of the church. Under his leadership, the congregation grew to more than 96 members, with up to 200 attending at different times. Reverend Ruffin served the church until he passed away in 1939. A women's mission was established that visited and cared for the needy and sick in the community. In the 1960s, the church was remodeled. Most of the community has left but former residents return each year for the church's annual celebrations. (2012)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Somerville State Park and Trailway — 9.5 mi
  Two park units on an 11,000-acre lake between Austin and College Station, joined by a thirteen-mile trailway for hikers, cyclists and riders with primitive camps along the way.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 9.9 mi
  A museum at Serbin of the Wends, a Slavic people from Lusatia whose congregation of nearly 600 crossed on the Ben Nevis in 1854, losing seventy-three to cholera on the way.
• Round Top and Festival Hill — 12 mi
  A German village on the old La Bahía Road, named for a house tower, with an 1867 stone church, a Fourth of July kept since 1851 and a concert hall a pianist built without blueprints.
• Monument Hill and Kreische Brewery State Historic Sites — 21 mi
  A shared tomb on the Colorado River bluff for the men of the Dawson fight and the black bean lottery, beside the ruins of a German stonemason's spring-fed brewery.

More markers nearby

• Gotcher Trace — 5.3 mi
• J. D. Giddings Lodge No. 280, A. F. & A. M. — 5.6 mi
• First National Bank — 5.6 mi
• County Named for Beloved Confederate General Robert E. Lee — 5.7 mi