Moore Station

On Farm Road 314 in southeastern Henderson County, a mile south and three miles west of Lake Palestine, sits one of the most remarkable small towns in Texas. Moore Station was founded in 1876 by men and women who, barely a decade earlier, had been held in bondage.[1][2]

It began with an act of extraordinary generosity: a plot of land, donated by a formerly enslaved couple, for a church and a school. A century and a half later, the community they built still stands — an incorporated city, still governed and inhabited by the descendants of its founders.

This is the story of the families who made it: the Moores, the Andersons, the Cofers, the Evanses, and the households who stood alongside them.

Freedom came to Texas in June 1865, but land did not come with it. The Freedmen's Bureau in Texas held no property to redistribute, and the promise of "forty acres and a mule" never materialized. Worse, the state's Black Codes and the 1866 Homestead Act of Texas barred African Americans from the 160 acres of free public land available to every white settler.[5]

Across the state, when Black families saved enough to buy property, white landowners often refused to sell, or canceled informal contracts on the eve of the deed transfer.[5]

In Henderson County, the newly freed men and women of the Fincastle district did what most freedpeople had to do: they sharecropped, often for their former enslavers, in communities such as Fincastle, Pleasant Ridge, and New York, Texas.[2] But they were saving. Around 1872, families began leaving the old plantation lands behind — places remembered by names like Crossroads, Flat Creek, and Stockard, and former masters named Ratliff, Faulk, Wofford, and Coleman — and started purchasing land of their own a few miles to the north.[2]

Among the purchasing families were the Andersons, the Cofers, the Douglases, and the Hightowers.[2]

Every acre was bought with cash earned in the fields — no government grant, no inherited wealth, and the law itself set against them. That they succeeded at all is the foundation on which everything that followed was built.

Anderson and Lucinda Moore gave the town its name and its heart. Recorded in the 1870 census with their daughters Rovana and Susan, the Moores had accumulated land within roughly a decade of emancipation — and their first recorded act with it was to give some of it away, donating the ground for the Methodist church and school in 1876.[1][2]

Land title abstracts and the 1880 federal census document Anderson Moore's presence and landholding in the area.[7][8] Hannah Moore, raising her grandchildren in the same 1870 census, anchors a second branch of the Moore name among the founding households.[2]

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.

The Cofers appear in the record twice over: Addison Cofer and Mary Jane Larkin are enumerated in the 1870 census with children Addison Jr., Norton, and Omega, and the Cofers are likewise named among the families who purchased land in the Moore Station area in the 1870s.[2]

Community tradition counts Addison (Adderson) Cofer among the ancestors from whom much of present-day Moore Station descends.[2][6] Few founding families are as firmly stitched into both the documentary record and the living memory of the town.

Through Omega Cofer's daughter Gertrude Cofer, and her marriage to Henry Evans, the Cofer line joined the Evans line — the union at the heart of the family gathering today.

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.

Moore Station stayed small through the early twentieth century — a church, several homes, and three businesses were reported there in the 1930s and 1940s, with a population of about twenty.[1]

But it never disappeared. The population climbed to an estimated 268 by 1980 and 355 by 1982,[1] and the community formally incorporated as a general-law city — reported as occurring in 1972 — giving the descendants of the founders their own mayor, council, and civic government.[9]

At the 2000 census, Moore Station's 184 residents were nearly 99 percent African American; at the 2020 census, the city's 160 residents remained almost 89 percent Black.[2] Meanwhile Fincastle — once the wealthiest community in the county, built on enslaved labor — had dwindled to a population of twenty-five by 2000.[3]

There is a quiet, powerful reversal in that: the plantation district faded, and the town the freedmen built is the one that still holds elections, still gathers, and still bears its founders' name.

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.

View the Yearbook Index →Download Full Yearbook PDF (20 MB) →

In the late 1970s, Athens Review staff writer John H. Cox drove out to Moore's Station and wrote one of the only contemporary newspaper accounts of the community.[10] His article opened with a line that the people of Moore Station have repeated ever since:

“Moore's Station was settled by black people newly freed from slavery. They wanted a place where they could live together.”

Cox described iron-ore soil that “looks unfriendly,” old stumps marking where part of the mighty East Texas forest once stood, and homes and businesses scattered across a town of about two hundred people — all of them Black. Moore's Station, he wrote, was one of the few all-Black towns in the state, and always had been, ever since 1876, when Anderson and Lucinda Moore donated a plot of land for a Methodist church and school on the border of Flat Creek, where the creek now runs into Lake Palestine.

At the time of the article, the family history committee of the Henderson County Historical Commission was working to reconstruct the community's past. Mrs. Estelle Corder, the committee's chairman, had spent years assembling the story from interviews and scraps of research — because, as Cox found when he searched the Clint W. Murchison Memorial Library, almost nothing about this unique community had ever been written down.

Why families came to the high ground

After the War Between the States, Black families who had gained their freedom grew fearful that their former enslavers would harm them. Together they relocated to the “high ground” the Moores had donated, and through the years the community stayed. In the early years the men farmed, trapped, hired out as farm hands, and sold logs for firewood — hard work that brought in little money. The women carried the responsibility of raising the families. After irrigation made cotton a major crop in West Texas, many of the men packed up and traveled west for the harvest season, returning home for the balance of the year.

Frank and Pearlie Cumby

Frank Cumby and his wife Pearlie, both seventy-eight at the time of the interview, had spent their entire married life in Moore's Station. Mrs. Cumby was fourteen when her father moved the family there. He chose it, she said, because “No one would bother us up here like they did down in the old Union Community” — a settlement west of Moore's Station, toward what is now New York, Texas.

Black families, she recalled, were having trouble with the Ku Klux Klan everywhere except in Moore's Station. Her account matched Mrs. Corder's, who noted how well white and Black residents got along there — in part, Corder observed plainly, because the land at Moore's Station was considered so poor that whites wanted nothing to do with it.

Mrs. Cumby's uncle, Grammar Tatum, ran the general store and the cotton gin, and helped lift up the community. Pearlie and Frank both remembered the one-room schoolhouse they attended: “We carried water from the Lone Star Spring to the school house,” Mrs. Cumby said. The spring lay behind the Green Douglas farm, where the Douglas family still lived. Community life turned on those two places — the school and Uncle Tatum's store. Most of the written records were kept by Tatum's father, Charlie, and when his house burned, the records burned with it.

Incorporation and a first mayor

Several years before the article, the community incorporated and elected its first and only mayor, Matthew (June) Wallace, Jr., a newcomer who had arrived in Moore's Station twenty years earlier. Wallace expected the community would go on much as it always had — looking after itself. Mrs. Corder promised that the Historical Commission would keep digging to bring out more of the county's Black history.

The published record of Moore Station is honest but thin — the Texas State Historical Association itself notes that the identification of Anderson and Lucinda Moore as former slaves rests on a single source.[1] Much of the richer detail comes from community and family tradition, which is typical of freedmen's settlements, whose histories were rarely written down by the institutions of their time.

Families wishing to deepen and document this history should look to:

• The Henderson County deed records in Athens — including the Moores' 1876 donation deed and the 1870s land purchases by the Anderson, Cofer, Douglas, and Hightower families.
• The 1870 and 1880 federal census manuscripts.
• Freedmen's Bureau records for Texas.
• J. J. Faulk's 1926 History of Henderson County.
• The Texas Freedom Colonies Project at Texas A&M University, which documents and maps Black settlements such as Moore Station across the state.