Hopkinsville Community, A Colony of Freedmen

The plaque and the Handbook of Texas date this community differently. The plaque has Henry Hopkins buying land in 1872 and Antioch Baptist Church forming in 1873; the Handbook dates the church to 1889 and a school to 1898. Freedmen's settlements formed after 1865 because the Freedmen's Bureau had no land to give and the 1866 Texas homestead law kept Black families off public land. They bought what they could and made church and school their centers. This Hopkinsville is not the one in Gonzales County.

What the plaque says

Hopkinsville Community, A Colony of Freedmen Members of the Hopkins family came to De Witt County in 1854 as slaves of Judge Henry Clay Pleasants (d. 1899). They worked for a time on a Gonzales County plantation and returned to this area after the Civil War as freedmen. In 1872 Henry Hopkins bought 42 acres of land and established the Hopkinsville community (1 mile west). Residents of the settlement organized the Antioch Baptist Church in 1873 and began a school about ten years later. Although the school closed in 1956, members of the Antioch Baptist Church continue to worship near Hopkinsville. (1983)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 4.5 mi
  A cattle-country museum in Cuero's 1903 Knights of Pythias Hall, telling the Guadalupe Valley's 1866 drive north and the Sutton-Taylor feud that bloodied DeWitt County.
• Fannin Battleground State Historic Site — 24 mi
  The open prairie east of Goliad where Fannin's retreating column formed a square short of the Coleto Creek timber on March 19, 1836, and surrendered the next day.
• De León Plaza — 25 mi
  The central plaza of Guadalupe Victoria, the only predominantly Mexican colony in Texas, founded by Martín De León in 1824 and taken from his family after 1836.
• Museum of the Coastal Bend — 25 mi
  Victoria College's museum of thirteen thousand years on the middle Texas coast, from Clovis hunters and Karankawa potters to La Salle's lost Fort St. Louis and the first ranches.

More markers nearby

• Clinton — 2.0 mi
• Arneckeville — 3.6 mi
• Eugene A. Daule — 4.2 mi
• Morgan Steamship Line — 4.2 mi