Houston’s historic Antioch Baptist Church was founded by formerly enslaved people in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Its congregants first met in a brush arbor along Buffalo Bayou in the Fourth Ward, west of the city center. But by the end of the 1860s, the congregation was meeting in a building at the corner of Rusk and Bagby streets, where the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts now stands. Histories of Antioch unite in calling this early site “Baptist Hill.”
Exactly when it acquired that name is unclear. But if you know Houston, you know that “hills” around here don’t much deserve that name. Notwithstanding the somewhat misleading images that marketed the city to migrants in early years, we don’t have lots of hills in these here parts. So why, I long wondered, was the corner of Rusk and Bagby called Baptist Hill?
The earliest 2-D maps of the city don’t shed light on the question. Here’s a crop from an 1866 map published with that year’s city directory, which shows the area in question as a blank polygon just to the right of the Episcopal and Masonic cemeteries. (Follow Rusk and Bagby to the corner where they meet.)
Three years later, in the city’s 1869 map, that blank space has been platted, and you can see a rectangle captioned “Col. Baptist” on the corner of Rusk and Bagby. But this map also contains something new: a jagged line cutting across the orderly real estate rectangles nearby, with no buildings on the lots it passes through.
In 1873, a “bird’s eye view” map made by Augustus Koch gives a much clearer picture of what that line was: a huge gully that cleaved the land in that bend of Buffalo Bayou and left the “Colored” Baptist church (marked with the number 15) on the high ground. In other words, a “Baptist Hill.”
(Note that the compass orientation on this map is the reverse of the first two. Here you are looking south from the bayou, rather than north towards it. Gravestones in the Episcopal and Masonic cemeteries, marked “17” and “18” by Koch, are now on your right, instead of on your left.)
The map also shows that the gully was quite the inconvenience to the residents of and visitors to the “hill.” Rusk Street more or less disappears into its recesses. At the height of Reconstruction in Houston, the first Antioch church building served as a frequent meeting place for white and Black Republicans in Harris County, who mostly converged on the spot from points east of the hill. No wonder, then, that the white editors of the Houston Daily Union, a Republican newspaper, noted on February 24, 1869:
A bridge over the gully on Rusk street, near the Baptist (colored) church is much needed.
A month later, on March 10, 1869, the Union returned to the subject, and also revealed that members of the Black community were working to improve access to the church:
There is a wide and deep gully on Rusk street, rendering access to the colored Baptist Church difficult. The freedmen are now engaged in constructing a bridge over that gully. They need and desire one, and will not the city Council come to their relief? Some fifty families have access to the city through this street.
The reference to the city council spotlights one of the reasons why representation within municipal governments was so important to urban Black communities during Reconstruction. By 1870, there were Black Houstonians serving as city aldermen, including Sandy Parker, one of the earliest Baptist preachers at Antioch and the representative for the Fourth Ward. He was replaced by a white alderman in 1871, but other Black men continued as representatives of other wards. And on December 16, 1871 (according to a report from December 19 in the Houston Union), these aldermen met in the city council to receive a “petition of Ed Jameson and others, for the erection of a bridge over the gully near the Colored Baptist Church in the Fourth Ward.” The petition was referred to a subcommittee on streets and bridges.
What happened to that petition is unclear. (The 1873 map suggests that a bridge had not been built by then.) Within a few years, Antioch had purchased a new lot farther away from the bayou—the one where it currently sits—and church histories remember 1879 as the year when the congregation, led by minister Jack Yates, marched from “Baptist Hill” to the impressive brick structure its new location. The new building was designed and built by Richard Allen, a member of the church and one of the first Black state legislators during Reconstruction.
By 1891, a new bird’s eye map of Houston pictured a vacant, overgrown lot on the corner where the church had once stood. (See also the return of the blank space from 1866 on an 1884 map). Unlike Koch’s 1873 map, the 1891 map did not depict a gully at all, or suggest that the corner stood on a “hill.” But it did contain a curious feature: two shaded black lines in the middle of Rusk Street across Bagby, in the general shape of a bridge.
For me, it now raises the question of whether the Reconstruction effort to build a bridge to “Baptist Hill” had, at some point, succeeded, but too late to make a difference to the historic African American congregation that had once worshipped there.
