Chapter One
Moore Station
A Freedom Colony in East Texas
§ I
From Emancipation to Community
Moore Station sits in southeastern Henderson County, Texas — near Farm Road 314, west of Lake Palestine. Its footprint is small, but its significance is not. The community emerged during Reconstruction as an African American settlement founded by people who had lived through slavery and were determined to build lives defined by family, faith, education, landownership, and self-government.
Communities of this kind are now commonly called freedom colonies. Across Texas, formerly enslaved African Americans and their descendants established hundreds of settlements between the end of the Civil War and the early twentieth century. These settlements were often organized around several institutions: a church, a school, family-owned land, a cemetery, and networks of relatives who supported one another. The Texas Freedom Colonies Project has documented more than 500 such communities established between roughly 1865 and 1930.
Moore Station followed this pattern.
§ II
The Families Recorded in 1870
The 1870 United States census was historically important because it was the first federal census to list formerly enslaved African Americans by name in ordinary population schedules. Before emancipation, enslaved people were generally recorded in federal slave schedules by age, sex, and race under the name of an enslaver — never by their own full names.
Among the Black families living in the area that became Moore Station in 1870 were:
- Anderson and Lucinda Moore
- Addison Cofer and Mary Jane Larkin
- Ralph and Martha Calhoun
- James and Ghana Brownfield
- Flora Dickinson and her children
- Hannah Moore and her extended kin
The household of Addison and Mary Jane Cofer included their sons Addison Jr., Norton, and Omega Cofer — Gertrude Cofer Evans's father, and great-grandfather to the Evans line still gathering today.
§ III
Anderson & Lucinda Moore
The community is believed to have been named for Anderson Moore and Lucinda McDonald Moore, one of the pioneer families in the area. In 1876, they donated land for a Methodist church and a school. According to the historical record, the church and school formed the institutional beginning of Moore Station.
For people who had recently emerged from slavery, donating land for a church and school was an act of community creation. The church provided more than worship — it was a meeting place, a source of leadership, a center for mutual assistance, and one of the few institutions Black residents could fully control.
The school was another form of independence. Enslaved people had often been denied formal education; teaching an enslaved person to read was, in many places, discouraged or forbidden outright. A school meant literacy and learning could pass to the next generation as birthright, not privilege.
Anderson and Lucinda were not merely residents of a settlement that later carried their name. They gave it its foundation. They were also your ancestors.
§ IV
The Movement Toward Landownership
After emancipation, some freed families initially worked as sharecroppers around Fincastle, Pleasant Ridge, and New York in Henderson County. By the early 1870s, families began leaving former plantation areas and purchasing land around what became Moore Station — the Moores, Cofers, Andersons, Douglases, and Hightowers among them.
Landownership carried enormous meaning. It provided —
- A measure of economic independence
- Permanent homes for growing families
- Property that could be inherited
- Room for churches, schools, and farms
- A place to bury and remember the dead
- Some protection from displacement
Land did not free Black Texans from segregation, racial violence, discriminatory laws, or political suppression. But land gave families a foundation on which institutions could survive across generations. Moore Station grew out of that determination.
§ V
Bethel Cemetery
Bethel Cemetery became one of the places where the community's family history was physically preserved. Its burials include members of the Cofer, Evans, Hightower, Bradley, Bell, and other Moore Station families. FamilySearch's cemetery index connects both Henry Evans (1899–1978) and Gertrude Cofer (1900–1986) to Bethel Cemetery.
A cemetery in a freedom colony is more than a burial ground. It is a record of family relationships, evidence of long-term settlement, a source of dates and military service and religious affiliation, and a physical link between present-day descendants and the founding generation.
§ VI
Moore Station's Changing Population
The Texas State Historical Association reports that Moore Station's population was only about twenty in 1930 and 1940, but it later grew substantially, reaching estimates of 268 in 1980 and 355 in 1982 before declining again.
The 2020 census reported approximately 160 residents, with the great majority identifying as Black or African American.
That suggests an unusual continuity: although Moore Station remained small, it retained its identity as a historically Black community more than 150 years after emancipation.
§ VII
Schools and Community Continuity
Moore Station's school history continued well beyond the first school established in 1876. Generations of children in the community were educated locally, and the school remained a center of gravity alongside the church long after the founding era.
A surviving 1961 Central High School yearbook from Moore Station has been digitized through the Henderson County TXGenWeb project — a rare visual record of students, teachers, and community life in the mid-twentieth century.
§ VIII
What This Story Establishes
Through Omega Cofer, this family descends from Addison Cofer and Mary Jane Larkin Cofer. Through Annastine Moore, it descends from Anderson Moore and Lucinda McDonald Moore. Gertrude Cofer represented the union of the Cofer and Moore lines. Her marriage to Henry Evans joined those families with the Evans line.
Our ancestors moved from slavery into freedom, established families, acquired land, created a church and school, built Moore Station, and left a community that still bears the Moore family name. That is what we gather to remember.