Hopewell Freedom Colony at Bassett Farms Conservancy

By: Evan R. Thompson, Executive Director, Preservation Texas

Bassett Farms Conservancy, property of Preservation Texas, is a historic 2,400-acre farm and ranch located southeast of Waco. Preservation Texas is in the process of rehabilitating Bassett Farms Conservancy to become a statewide preservation training center. Visit bassettfarms.org to learn more.

Approximately 300 acres of Bassett Farms Conservancy was the site of Hopewell, a Freedom Colony established by 1875. This article summarizes current research findings.

On December 3, 1875, two former slaves, Henry Jefferson and William Moton, purchased 193 acres on Sulphur Creek in eastern Falls County, Texas. They paid $1,032 in gold for what would later be described as sticky, poorly drained land. Jefferson and Moton had known each other for some years, having registered to vote together eight years earlier in Marlin, the county seat, on July 22, 1867. Jefferson was later ordained as a Baptist minister in 1869 and founded Hopewell Baptist Church that same year. A physical church would eventually be built near their farms at Hopewell, about 15 miles east of Marlin; it is no longer standing.

Three other black farmers and their families would join them, making payments on small farms carved out of the 193-acre tract: Robert “Bob” Green, Dred Williams, and Edmund Taylor. Rev. Jefferson’s son, Anderson, also purchased a small plot of land adjacent to the 193-acre tract. Surrounding tracts of land would later be home to other small blackowned farms or rented to sharecroppers who were later buried at Hopewell Cemetery.

Green, Williams and Taylor moved to the Hopewell community from nearby Duck Creek in Robertson County, where they had spent their first years as free men after Emancipation in 1865 until about 1870. Williams had both been owned by Aleck Gammill, a planter in Pickens County, Alabama and adjacent Noxubee County, Mississippi who died in Pass Christian in 1861. Gamill had acquired Bob Green after he was sold out of the Green family in Virginia “because he would not be whipped.”

In the spring of 1862, several months after the death of Aleck Gammill in Pass Christian, plans were made to move the Gammill slaves to Louisiana. It was at this time that Bob Green and Dred Williams, along with Jerry Chambers (who had been a slave with the famed black Mormon pioneer, Samuel Chambers), Archie Vance, Jerry Walker and Alex Wilson, along with a number of others, escaped to freedom.

As Aleck’s daughter Amanda Gammill recalled many years later, “[In the] spring of 1862 some fifteen of our negroes left our plantation and went with a man named Jim Bullina and enlisted on some steamboat there at Pass Christian, this boat used to be called Creole before the war but after the Yankees captured her they changed her into a gunboat and also changed her name but I do not know what the name of the gunboat was.” The gunboat was the U.S.S. Morning Light. The Gammill family knew that their slaves were on the ship, but were powerless to act.

In January 1863, the ship was sunk off of Sabine Pass during a Confederate attempt to break the Union blockade of Galveston. An explosion wounded Jerry Chambers, who lost most of the vision in one eye. The sailors were captured and the African-Americans (including Benjamin Drummond, the first patient in Washington, D.C.’s Old Naval Hospital when it opened in 1866; their Emancipation Day celebration is named for him) were separated and sent to prison in Houston under the management of the Confederate Negro Labor Bureau.

Jack Gammill, the brother of the late owner of these “runaways” sailors who had now become Confederate prisoners, also lived in Noxubee Co. and knew them. Jack Gammill had refugeed with his slaves to Texas in 1863 on a plantation owned by his brother-in-law Dr. W. L. Golson and another relative, G. C. Richardson. Gammill would eventually learn of the fate of the Morning Light and the whereabouts of his brother’s former slaves. They arranged for Dr. Golson to move them out of prison to the Golson/Richardson plantation on Duck Creek for the duration of the war.

It was on Duck Creek where, in 1864, while still enslaved, Bob Green married Martha King, one of Jack Gammill’s refugeed slaves. Jack had purchased Martha in 1844 to be the wife of his slave named Jim King. (Jim also escaped slavery, stealing Jack’s horse during the move to Texas and eventually entering into Union service during which he died). For many years into the early 20th century, Martha remained in contact with the Gammill family, often visiting with Jack’s daughter Georgiana (Gammill) Ward in Marlin (whose husband would be sheriff of Falls County during a period of lynchings).

After Emancipation, Dred Williams married another slave, Lorena Preston, who came from the Bluegrass region of Kentucky. Edmond Taylor had known both Williams and Green in Alabama during slavery, and may have been a slave on the Golson or Richardson plantations. After spending a number of years post- Emancipation on Duck Creek, Green, Williams and Taylor and their families found their way to Hopewell.

Back at Hopewell, Rev. Henry Jefferson set aside land for the Hopewell Cemetery on one of his two tracts of land and the first burials probably took place by about 1875. Soon, Hopewell Baptist Church would be built on an adjacent parcel, with the trustees (William Moton, Anderson Jefferson and Sloan Jones) taking title to the property for $10 from a Confederate veteran, L.T. Whitlow, on March 17, 1887 (the church had already been built by that time).

Hopewell School was built nearby and members of the community, including Anderson Jefferson, served as trustees. It was closed soon after 1900 and consolidated with another community school at Blue Ridge. School records giving the numbers of students and names of teachers with their pay are still extant in the Falls County Courthouse.

The first of the farmers to die at Hopewell was Dred Williams on 1 August 1877. In 1878, his widow “Rena” and children took title to the farm as the “Heirs of Dred Williams.” Ownership of the property is still recorded in Falls County as “Heirs of Dred Williams.” Rena remarried the following year to a hostler, Joe Jones. Jones was the driver for Kosse’s country doctor, Dr. W. C. Blalock and was long remembered in the community.

Bob Green died in July 1888, dropping dead in his cotton patch. His family and neighbors “had to scuffle around” to pay for the coffin from “Mr. White” in Kosse. Anderson Jefferson helped to dress him and placed him in the coffin. Martha never remarried, living off of the modest rental income paid to her by her sons and neighbors who tended the property, and paying the taxes by periodically selling livestock and eggs. Bob’s death was recorded in his step-son’s Bible, published by the American Bible Society in 1870, as July 17, 1888. Just four days earlier, Dr. Blalock recorded a visit from Bob Green and charged him $3.00 for his examination and medicine.

In later years, Martha secured a Union widow’s pension from the federal government. Testimony in support of her application came from neighbors, from members of the Gammill family, and from her husband’s fellow sailor, Jerry Chambers, who lived nearby in Kosse. Martha died in 1914, and the land that she owned (36.6 acres and an additional 30 acres purchased by her husband in 1883) was sold by her heirs to their neighbor, Mrs. Hattie Ford Bassett. Her family remained in the community, and most were buried at Hopewell Cemetery.

Rev. Henry Jefferson died on June 18, 1889 and has a headstone in Hopewell Cemetery. In addition to his 58-acre portion (in two parcels) of the 193-acre tract, he acquired additional land: 13.7 acres in 1878; 25.7 acres in 1881 and 13.72 acres in 1882. Struggling with debt, in 1896 his widow deeded two of the tracts to her sons Jack and Anderson Jefferson. Debt repayment schedules were repeatedly amended and extended until finally by 1904 all of the Henry Jefferson property had been consolidated into the ownership of neighboring landowner, Mrs. Hattie Ford Bassett.

In 1903, son Anderson Jefferson and his wife Joannah sold their own 28.7 acre farm to Mrs. Hattie Ford Bassett and moved to Purcell, Oklahoma. William Moton sold out a bit earlier. On October 4, 1900, while living at Velsaco, Brazoria Co., Texas, William and his wife Mary C. sold their two parcels totaling 43.7 acres to self-made Falls County land speculator George S. Cousins for $200. Cousins sold the property to Mrs. Hattie Ford Bassett for $200 and the “taxes due thereon for the year 1904” on February 2, 1904. The Motons later moved to Purcell, Oklahoma where they were last found enumerated in the census in 1910.

Edmond (sometimes Edward) Taylor purchased his 36.6 acre farm at Hopewell for $168 on November 11, 1878. But he was not a Baptist, and in 1883 he was one of five trustees who purchased land for the Long Branch ME Church in nearby Alto Springs (the cemetery was recently recognized with a state historical marker). Shortly after 1900, Taylor and his wife sold out to Mrs. Hattie Ford Bassett and moved to Dallas. Some of Taylor’s descendants remained as tenant farmers at Hopewell. In total, 164 acres of the original 193-acre Hopewell tract became part of Bassett Farms.

For many years, Dred Williams’s grandson B.D. Jones worked as the Bassett family handyman until his death in 1999. His family home still stands, too: a one story, two-room board-and-batten house with a collapsing porch and an overgrown yard full of rusting farm implements, two log outbuildings and a well -- and a second, collapsing one-story house a short distance away. The 29acre property is still owned by the heirs of Dred Williams.

Hopewell Cemetery is still in active, although very infrequent use. It is well marked and can theoretically be accessed from the main highway connecting Kosse and Marlin, Highway 7. To date, 92 burials have been identified both from headstones and from searches of Texas death records. The cemetery has grown up in tall grasses and has never been properly recorded. Many of the burials are unmarked by headstones. Some are hand made out of concrete, with the handle of an outdoor faucet pressed into the surface to make a floral design.

Hopewell Church collapsed in recent years and its remains were removed. The property is still owned by the church organization. All that survives on the small site is a commemorative plaque put up by B.D. Jones in the 1980s, the well and an outhouse. A family member in Mexia still has the church records. The nearby school is gone as well, and is thought to have been on the same site.

Preservation Texas seeks to fully document and preserve the cultural and historical legacy of Hopewell long-term, through research, archaeological field schools, educational programs, and (through the possible lease/ownership of the Williams-Jones property) restoration of the sole surviving architectural assets of the community. It is an important historic site that can be used to teach Texans about Reconstruction Era history and the story of Freedom Colonies.