Kincheonville

The community's last chapter was written by its founder's son. Thomas Kincheon II promoted development of the family land, and Kincheon Subdivision No. 1 opened in 1952, followed by a second when the first sold. Kincheonville had run roughly from Paisano Trail south to Davis Lane and from Brodie Lane east to Longview Road, a freedmen's settlement founded in June 1865 where Hispanic and Anglo neighbors also lived. The Kincheon family moved to East Austin in the 1960s, as most of the city's other Black families had. Street signs are what remain.

What the plaque says

Kincheonville Thomas Kincheon, a former slave from Mississippi, established the rural community of Kincheonville in this area shortly after emancipation in 1865. Many independent communities were created in Texas by African Americans following the Civil War, usually on undesirable or unprofitable land. Although these places were often poor, the freedmen were able to live their lives and practice their religion without outside interference. Unlike other freedmen's communities in Texas, tradition holds that Anglos and Hispanics lived alongside African Americans in Kincheonville. Kincheon and his wife, Mary, operated a farm that supplied milk and butter to Austin's all-Black Tillotson college. Several members of the Kincheon family are buried at the Williamson Creek Cemetery four miles east of this site. Public life in Kincheonville was centered on Zion Rest Baptist Church, established in 1903 as both a congregation and a school. Kincheonville remained a small farming community until 1928, when the city passed a new master plan designed to force African Americans out of their homes. Public utilities like schools and water lines were only open to African Americans in a "Negro District" on the far side of East Avenue (now IH-35). This policy, combined with the economic shocks of the great depression, pushed many residents out of Kincheonville and other historically black neighborhoods. In 1952, Thomas Kincheon II sold the land for suburban development. Although the Kincheon family moved to east Austin in the 1960s, Blumie, Elijah, James Andrew and Minnie Streets still bear their names. Zion Rest continues to serve the area from a sanctuary built in 1965. (2015)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Barton Springs Pool — 5.3 mi
  A three-acre pool in the bed of Barton Creek, fed by the fourth-largest spring in Texas at 68 to 70 degrees, and shared with an endangered salamander found almost nowhere else.
• McKinney Falls State Park — 6.7 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• Texas State Capitol — 7.0 mi
  Austin's fourth statehouse, a Renaissance Revival capitol of 1888 that stands 311 feet to its Goddess of Liberty and was restored after the 1983 fire.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 7.1 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.

More markers nearby

• Boggy Creek Masonic Cemetery — 3.4 mi
• Broken Spoke — 3.5 mi
• Espinosa-Olivares-Aguirre Expedition — 4.6 mi
• Manchaca United Methodist Church — 4.6 mi