Little Egypt

The name was chosen for a departure. Residents called their settlement Egypt because they had left bondage behind, and its Baptist church, by its own account, organized in 1880. By 1962 the streets were dirt and the houses had no running water, electricity or gas. Of twenty-eight landowning families, about two-thirds wanted to move near one another, and some feared the buildings would be condemned. That May roughly 200 residents left, led by William Hill, then eighty-nine, most for Oak Cliff or Rockwall County. A cemetery placard dates Little Egypt Cemetery to 1896.

What the plaque says

Little Egypt The rural settlement of Little Egypt began when former slave Jeff Hill bought a tract of approximately thirty acres of land across Thurgood Lane from this marker in 1883. By the 1920s, the Egypt Chapel Baptist Church and a one-room school had been added to a growing number of homesteads on the tract. Due to Little Egypt's early establishment and distance from Dallas, for more than seventy years it retained many of its rural characteristics despite the growing encroachment of urban development. In 1962, however, the entire community collectively sold their property to developers. The church was relocated to south Dallas, where it remains as a testament to African American accomplishment and perseverance in Texas. (2018)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fair Park — 6.4 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 6.6 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 7.4 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 7.6 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.

More markers nearby

• Flag Pole Hill Park — 0.7 mi
• McCree Cemetery — 1.3 mi
• Reinhardt Elementary School — 2.3 mi
• Civilian Conservation Corps Company 2896 — 2.4 mi