Sweet Home

Lee County, TX

Status: Located – Needs More Research

Year Established: 1890

Council of Governments: CAPCOG

Public History: Sweet Home, on Farm Road 141 eight miles northeast of Giddings in northeastern Lee County, was founded by black settlers from Washington and Fayette counties. Cotton and grain farming were the major occupations, and a grain mill and a cotton gin operated there. The first church in Sweet Home, the Providence Missionary Baptist Church, began in a log cabin about 1880. Until 1906 residents used a burial ground near the church; no signs of this cemetery remain today. A one-room school named Liberty Valley, which began a few years after the founding of the community, was near a stagecoach station at the edge of the community, near Nails Creek and across from Vernon’s Store. In 1890 residents purchased a site for a new school and church nearer the center of town. The first service of the Sweet Home Church was held in 1890; parishioners were seated on a log that remains under the current church. A new cemetery site was purchased in 1898. The Sweet Home congregation rebuilt their church in 1919 and remodeled it in 1945 and 1951. The Sweet Home school began classes in the church, but sometime before 1898 a two-story building had been erected. In 1898 the school had an enrollment of ninety-six, and in 1908, at least seventy-two. A Rosenwald School was later built. The new school also served as a community recreation center until it burned. The Work Projects Administration built a concrete-tile school at the community that operated until 1954, when the Post Oak school district absorbed its students. Sweet Home began to decline with the failure of the cotton economy in the late 1920s. By the early 1970s church services were held there once a month, and annual homecomings took place on the third Sunday in July. In 2000 the population was thirty.

Community History: “According to Sitton and Conrad’s “”Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow””, citing an interview with George and Vivian Francis, twelve families from nearby Antioch founded Sweet Home in 1890.

Founded by Wesley Taylor and Martha Jane Crenshaw and other black pioneers”

Cemetery: name unknown

Church: Sweet Home Missionary Baptist Church

School: yes (only slab remains)