Jacob Fontaine

Fontaine's best-known enslaver, the Rev. Edward Fontaine, a great-grandson of Patrick Henry, came to Austin as President Lamar's secretary. Jacob was his sexton at St. David's Episcopal Church in 1855 and preached to Black worshipers in the afternoons in a church basement. After emancipation he worked as a janitor in the old Land Office, was active in Republican and Greenback politics, and ran a grocery, laundry, book and medicine store. He started the Gold Dollar with sixty dollars earned from a gold dollar his sister Nelly Miller gave him when they were reunited in 1872.

What the plaque says

Jacob Fontaine (c. 1808 - 1898) Jacob Fontaine was born in Arkansas and came to Austin about 1850 as a slave of Episcopal minister Edward Fontaine. In 1864 Jacob began preaching separate service for fellow slaves attending the First Baptist Church, then founded the First Baptist Church, Colored. About 1867, Jacob also established five other churches in this area and a county association of black Baptists. He was politically active, published the "Gold Dollar," an early black newspaper, and urged black voters to support Austin's bid for the University of Texas in 1881. He is buried here in an unmarked grave. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• George Washington Carver Museum — 0.5 mi
  East Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.
• LBJ Presidential Library — 0.7 mi
  A ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 0.7 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.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 0.7 mi
  The state's history museum at the head of Congress Avenue, built around the hull of La Salle's ship La Belle, raised from Matagorda Bay with 1.8 million artifacts.

More markers nearby

• George Washington Glasscock — steps away
• Gen. George W. Terrell — steps away
• Major William Martin "Buck" Walton — steps away
• Swante Palm — steps away