The Juneteenth Trail: Galveston to Emancipation Park

On June 19, 1865, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, a Union general named Gordon Granger arrived at Galveston and issued General Order No. 3, announcing that all enslaved people in Texas were free. That day — Juneteenth — became the oldest continuously celebrated commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States, and it began right here on this island. This driving trail follows the story of that freedom from the place it was announced to the places it was built into a community. In Galveston you'll stand near where the order was read, visit the church where freedpeople gathered, and see the villa now at the center of the annual commemoration. Then the trail crosses the causeway and drives inland to Houston, into the historic Fourth Ward — Freedmen's Town — where formerly enslaved people raised churches, homes, and businesses of their own, and on to Emancipation Park, ten acres that freedmen bought in 1872 so that they would always have a place to hold their Juneteenth. It is a trail about a promise delayed, then kept, then celebrated every June since.