Living above freedom Prior to commercial development, this was a freedmen's town. Story by RAVEN JORDAN
Photography courtesy of Dallas Municipal Archives. Map courtesy of Dallas Morning News Historical Archive.
NORTHLAKE SHOPPING CENTER and homes to the west, east and north of the strip center sit along the streets of Shoreview and Ferndale; that’s where the core of Little Egypt existed for nearly 100 years. Little Egypt was one of Dallas’ eight freedmen’s towns, neighborhoods where newly freed slaves lived after the Civil War. “Just a couple of years after Little Egypt was gone, I actually lived in Lake Highlands,” says Clive Siegle, a Richland College professor leading the ongoing excavation of an empty lot that was Little Egypt. “My parents bought a house about half-a-mile from the house that I’m in now.” A freedmen’s town is a historically Black community, typically located in the South and“founded via cash purchase or adverse possession, often in flood-prone bottomlands on the edges of plantations and city boundaries,” according to the Texas State Historical Association. Following the Civil War and Reconstruction, formerly enslaved African-Americans sought places to live and raise their families. Few of these communities survived Dallas’ transformation into a bustling metropolis, except for some churches and cemeteries.
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“When it comes to freedmen’s towns, usually you’ll find a cemetery, especially a Black one, and you’ll find an older congregational Black church,” says Dr. George Keaton, a genealogist and historian. “Even though they may not be there, like Little Egypt, the congregation that’s there still exists when they moved in the mid-‘60s. And then you’re going to have some evidence of some type of business because [residents] had to be self-sufficient.” Little Egypt was a pocket that was once a small, yet significant, part of Lake Highlands. The name of the community alludes to the slaves finding freedom from Egypt in Bible stories. The 35-acre land was deeded by former slave owners to freed slaves Jeff and Hanna Hill in 1865 for $300. One of the original buildings was the Little Egypt Baptist Church. The community grew to about 200 as residents built their own houses. The Hill family pioneered the community, but the McCoy family also was influential. Theirs was the only house in Little Egypt with a telephone line. The community was centered around the church and had no running water nor electricity, Siegle says. Though
