On a summer day in 1872, a group of people only seven years removed from bondage gathered to commemorate their freedom. The former slaves met on a ten-acre parcel of land at the corner of Dowling and Elgin streets in an area of Houston called Third Ward. According to one resident, the neighborhood looked “very much like the country” despite being part of the city of Houston. Third Ward was the kind of place where most families raised chickens, or even a cow if they were lucky, where the mud-filled roads trapped horse-drawn buggies in the aftermath of thunderstorms
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