Houston's First Juneteenth

Yesterday I gave a research talk in which I said that the location for the first Juneteenth celebration in Houston in 1866 remains unknown. So of course today would be the day I found some evidence about that. I had been looking in all of the Houston newspapers easily accessible to me. The Evening Star, an apparently short-lived newspaper in Houston that is not widely held, is definitely not one of those. But apparently WPA researchers went through its pages while preparing Houston, a History and Guide. And they clipped the most extensive description I’ve yet seen of this first Juneteenth in the city. It’s now on a yellowing, typewritten page in a part of the Houston Public Library’s Henry Maresh Collection that has not yet been digitized.