Butch and I took the long way home from Saturday's race, going through Keezletown and the Community of Zenda, near Fridley's Gap and Brethren Woods.
Funds to restore and preserve this chapel are being raised in the valley, thanks to, as I understand it, a black from the south who visited the area and became interested in the history. This chapel was built in 1870 in the Community of Zenda, a community established by former slaves Henry Carter, Milton Grant, William Timbers and Richard Fortune. Each of the four families owned two-acre home plots. William and Hannah Carpenter, and the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, "deeded the land 'here to colored people. . .for. . .a church, burial ground and a school house.'"
The community of Zenda grew to 17 households and 80 people by 1900. And it was here that blacks were finally able to exercise their new rights to worship, marry, attend school, own property and be buried in a marked gravesite.
The school closed in 1925.
1 comment:
I've been wanting to go here for a long time and since it was first made public about the story, I still haven't gotten there. I tried to contact the man who is in charge of all this via email but the email address didn't work. I was thinking about having our youth do some type of work/help up there.
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