Camptown Settlement

Camptown was Brenham's first Black neighbourhood, on ground east of the courthouse square. The earliest known reference to it is from 1850, when the brush along the creeks there sheltered runaway slaves, and freedpeople settled it in earnest after emancipation. Mount Rose Missionary Baptist Church was organised there in 1868, and the community built the institutions segregation gave it no other way to get: its own churches, its own businesses and eventually its own college. Mount Rose Missionary Baptist Church and Camptown Cemetery are what survive most visibly. The college came in 1905. That March, Black and white community leaders met publicly after a man named Daniel Porter arrived looking for land and a building for a school for African Americans. Brenham Normal and Industrial College was legally established on 17 April 1906, when it bought the acreage for a campus. Alonzo L. Sledge, who had been born into slavery, served as president of the board of directors from 1906 to 1916. The first class had ten students. By 1913 there were 130. It taught elementary and secondary grades, a normal course certifying schoolteachers, and trades including bookkeeping, shorthand, agriculture, horticulture and mechanics. The Mount Olive Baptist District Association took ownership in 1916 when Porter died, and kept the classes running until 1927, after which only a theological department remained. The campus was listed on the National Register in 2025. Through the first half of the twentieth century Black professionals and Black owned stores in Brenham served their own community, and Henderson Park was laid out for it in the 1920s.