Freedmen's Town Historic District

Freedmen's Town, also called the Fourth Ward, is a district of roughly 567 buildings on forty blocks just west of downtown Houston. It grew from a settlement founded soon after Emancipation near Buffalo Bayou. Most surviving buildings went up between about 1890 and 1935 as low- and medium-cost housing for Black residents. One- and two-story frame shotgun houses, duplexes, tenements and earlier T- and L-plan cottages sit close together along narrow streets, many with porches and jig-cut ornament. Much of the housing was rental, built by small developers, and buildings were often moved, enlarged or reused. Churches such as Good Hope Missionary Baptist, a Gothic Revival design of 1929-30 by Black architect J. J. Hawkins, and Gregory Elementary School anchored community life. Public housing, freeway construction and downtown expansion in the mid-twentieth century erased much of the wider neighborhood. The remaining district is still largely intact, with 530 buildings counted as contributing, though demolitions and vacant lots threaten it.