Celia Allen's Bake Oven

Celia Allen was an enslaved cook in San Felipe de Austin who was freed in 1832 and then went on cooking in the same town for wages, managing a bake oven and working in the bakery that served as a gathering place until the town burned in 1836. The Texas Historical Commission has recovered the names of just under seventy enslaved people brought into Austin's colony in the 1820s and 1830s, and has been able to reconstruct four of those lives in any detail. Hers is one. Her great great great grandson, Bobby Byars, has served as mayor of San Felipe. The colony ran on the labour of people like her, and the paperwork says so plainly. Settlers were granted eighty acres for each enslaved person they brought in. The census Austin took of his colony in the mid 1820s counted four hundred and forty three enslaved people in a population of eighteen hundred, close to a quarter of everyone in it. Stephen F. Austin wrote in 1824 that cotton was the principal product that would lift the colony out of poverty, and that it could not be grown without the help of slaves. Mexican law kept trying to close the door. The 1827 constitution of Coahuila y Texas banned bringing in more slaves, and the next year the state legislature validated foreign indenture contracts instead, which colonists promptly wrote for ninety nine years with people they had bought. President Guerrero's abolition decree of 1829 exempted Texas within months. A replica of her kitchen was built at the reconstructed townsite, the last of its buildings to go up.