Lost Freedmen Towns of Austin

When freedom came to Texas in 1865, many of Austin's newly emancipated families did something remarkable: they founded their own towns. Ringing the capital on its edges, these freedom colonies — Clarksville to the west, Kincheonville to the southwest, and settlements scattered across the east side — were self-governing Black villages where families could own land, build churches, run schools, and answer to no former master. Some of these communities were later paved over, annexed, or displaced, their names surviving mostly in memory; but the churches and markers that still stand let us trace them on the ground. This drive covers a wide arc of the metro, from the surviving historic streets of Clarksville to the crossroads where Kincheonville supplied milk and butter to a Black college. Where a settlement left no marker or standing anchor — as with Wheatville, Masontown, and Pleasant Hill — it lives only in the telling, never faked as a stop. This is the map of freed Austin as its own people drew it.