It was mid-1865 and the Civil War was over. Slavery was officially dead. Although former slaves had their freedom, they weren’t given many tools with which to build a better future. Since forced illiteracy was one of the ugly aspects of slavery, the first thing they had to teach themselves was how to read and write. In their book entitled Slavery and the Making of America, historians James and Lois Horton described the situation as follows:

For the freed people, education was an important mark of their freedom and represented their hope for a better future. Since many slaves had been prohibited from learning to read and write, education was doubly important to them. About 95 percent of slaves were illiterate in 1863, but by 1877 more than six hundred thousand black children were in elementary schools.

Overcoming widespread illiteracy would require classrooms where reading and writing could be taught. The need for schools, or something resembling schools, was all too obvious.

In addition to schools, former slaves also wanted to build churches where they could practice the faith that had sustained them through roughly 250 years of slavery. Practicing such faith during slavery was difficult because of the policy of making it a crime to teach slaves how to read and write. Slaveowners had made it “a penal offense,” wrote historian Anna J. Cooper, to teach slaves “to read the Word of God.” (This was a cruel irony - one of many cruel ironies that accompanied slavery - inasmuch as it happened in a country whose constitution called for respect for religious freedom. Moreover, it utterly contradicted the New Testament’s call to spread the gospel to all people.) Construction of houses of worship was of utmost importance.

Inasmuch as former slaves lacked much in the way of financial resources, building both churches and schools in a community was often impossible. When only one structure could be afforded, an easy solution was to build a church that could double as a school through the week.

Examples of churches and church/schools built by former slaves can be found all across the South. However, there is no need to travel so broadly, for many examples exist in Fannin County.

According to the 1860 Fannin County Slave Census, compiled from the state archives and made available locally by Fannin County History Museum Curator Tom Scott, Fannin County had roughly 1,700 slaves that year. Once they were free, men and women began applying their impressive mastery of domestic skills towards building schools and churches.

An excellent example in Bonham is the Bethlehem Baptist Church. According to church records, the original building, constructed in 1871, was a log structure located between Preston and Lee streets. As the congregation grew, church members decided to buy the lot on Franklin Street that is the site of the present church building, built in 1924.

A cafeteria was added in 1941, and additional renovations were completed in 1988. (It is interesting to note that one Bethlehem Baptist member, Bonham resident Dorothy Dale, recalls that her first three years of elementary school, grades 1-3, were taught in church, the Fairview Baptist Church in Windom in the mid-1940s when it was located far north of its present site next to the Fannin Bank. After the third grade, Mrs. Dale continued her education at Booker T. Washington School in Bonham.)

In addition to Bethlehem Baptist are the interesting histories of Bradford Chapel A.M.E. (African Methodist Episcopal) and St. Paul C. M. E. (Christian Methodist Episcopal) churches.

Built in 1887, Bradford Chapel was originally known as Cain Chapel. In a history of the church that appeared in the December 13, 1985 issue of the Bonham Daily Favorite, the late L.E. McIntyre wrote that Cain Chapel was started when, “Mr. and Mrs. Fred Cook deeded two acres of ground to the (then) trustees of the church; namely, James Ragsdale, Anderson Rowlett, Isaac Johnson, Robert Jones and Henry Haskins, to build a church.”

“These men,” McIntyre further wrote, “were ex-slaves.” The original location of Cain Chapel, according to McIntyre, was “the west end of Johnson and West Third Streets.”

In 1949 Cain Chapel was badly damaged by what McIntyre called, “a small tornado or high wind” coming from the southwest. It was decided that the building had to come down.

Three new lots were bought at the corner of Poplar and West Third Street. The building of the new church was made possible in large part due to a $27,000 loan secured by Mrs. V. A. Bradford, a trustee at the time. The new church was named Bradford Chapel in her honor. “We moved into our new church,” wrote L.E. McIntyre, “in 1951.”

According to a history of St. Paul C.M.E. church written by church members, its first building, apparently built sometime in the late 1860s, was located in the same general area as Bradford Chapel, the southwest corner of Bonham known as Tanktown (because many railroad tanks were located in that area.) “The former slaves,” according to the history, “had difficulty erecting their first building. Men and women . . . worked together to make a humble log structure with a dirt floor.”

By the 1870s St. Paul moved to the east side of Bonham, and in 1876 F. Carson Moore donated the land on East Sixth Street that is the church’s present location. By 1897 this second building was moved to the rear of the lot to make room for a new chapel that could accommodate St. Paul’s growing numbers.

While there is no concrete, documented evidence that Bethlehem Baptist, Bradford Chapel or St. Paul ever doubled as schools, it is safe to assume, without doing considerable damage to historical accuracy, that they aided in educating former slaves and their descendants in some fashion.

One church from Fannin County’s past that does offer a concrete example of doubling as a school is the former Siloan (often written as Siloam) Church of Ravenna.

Church ledgers shown to me by Bonham resident Audrey Rayford, a native of Ravenna, shows that Siloan dates back to 1870. She recalls that her mother, Annie Hill Brown, attended Sandy School, and that the school in her mother’s time often used Siloan Church facilities for school-related programs since it lacked external buildings.

Evidence indicates that Siloan Church may have been used as an actual school at one point. One of the documents that Mrs. Rayford uncovered while digging through church papers is clearly entitled “Commencement Exercises, Class 1919, Siloam Intermediate School, April 25, 1919, Ravenna, Texas.” The commencement program also list “graduates, class prophet, class historian, class president,” as well as the “class motto, class flowers and class colors.” It seems safe to assume that Siloan indeed served, at least for a short period of time, as a school as well as a church.

In 1954 Siloan combined with the Belfountain Church of Ravenna - which was founded in 1882 with Mrs. Rayford’s grandmother, Mrs. L.L. Brown, serving as church secretary -to become Union Baptist, located on county road 1105, just north of the intersection with FM 274. Many of the documents and history of Union Baptist and its predecessor churches have been collected by Mrs. Rayford in an attempt to obtain a historical marker for the church.

All of the churches noted in this article, and many others just like them throughout Bonham and Fannin County, are still serving as places of worship - proud monuments to a people who overcame extreme adversity to build a better future. To borrow from the George Bernard Shaw line that Robert F. Kennedy helped to make famous in 1968, the former slaves didn’t look at what was and ask, “Why?” Instead, they dreamed of what could be and asked, “Why not?” Their story of building grand churches, some of which often doubled as schools, out of the ashes of the ugly institution of slavery is one of the truly bright spots of U.S., Texas and Fannin County history.

I would like to thank the following individuals for giving me interviews and/or information on their churches: Mr. Joe Dale and his wife, Dorothy, Mrs. Audrey Rayford, Ms. Altrice Huey, Mr. Sammy Bogar, and Mr. Robert Yeager.