Zion Hill Historic District

Zion Hill is a small, densely built neighborhood in old Nacogdoches, just north of Oak Grove Cemetery and beside Lanana Creek. Most of its buildings are one-story wood frame houses from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly bungalows, shotgun houses, two-room or saddlebag dwellings and pyramidal-roof homes, with little decorative detail. The area began on ten acres given to freedman Frank Walton in 1881. Walton and his wife later offered land to the newly formed Zion Hill Baptist Church, the first Black Baptist congregation in Nacogdoches, chartered in 1879. The present church, built in 1914 with Gothic Revival features, a cruciform plan and an eight-sided corner tower, is the district's only nonresidential building and its landmark. The Park Street Cemetery, tied to the earliest settlers, is also included. The district is valued for its intact character, tight development and its record of Black community life in the railroad-era growth of the town.