Jackson Morrow's Littig

The town stands on land given by a man who had been owned. Littig was established in 1883 along the Houston and Texas Central line in eastern Travis County, about six miles east of Manor, on acreage donated by Jackson Morrow, who had been enslaved and who bought some two thousand acres from the same plantation where he had been held. The town took its name instead from A. B. Littig, a former general division agent of the railroad who surveyed the townsite, which is the ordinary arithmetic of the period: the land came from one man and the name from another. A church and school went up in 1887 on ground donated by J. W. Bitting, and a post office opened in 1889 under postmaster Thomas B. Fowler. By 1900 there was a general store, two cotton gins, three churches and a hundred and sixty eight people. The school figures are the clearest record of what Littig actually was. In 1907 the community supported three one-teacher schools serving a hundred and eighty five Black students, and one school serving thirty three white students. More than five hundred freedom colonies were founded across Texas after emancipation, but few left a number that plain. The population fell to about a hundred and fifty by 1936 and thirty five by the 1940s, and the schools were consolidated away in 1952. Littig is not a ghost town. It is an active, self-identifying freedom colony whose residents have organised publicly against being annexed and against a wastewater plant proposed to discharge into Dry Creek, on the argument that a historic freedom colony should not be the default site simply because it has the least political power.