Joppa was established in 1872 by freed people from the Miller plantation, among them Henry Critz Hines, and it is one of the few freedmen's settlements in Texas still occupied on the ground it was built on. Hines had been brought to Texas from Alabama by his own owner and placed with the planter William Brown Miller for safekeeping until the war ended. He ran Miller's ferry across the Trinity, work that left him with capital and standing, and after emancipation Miller turned over land along the river to him. It was bottomland. As the historian Donald Payton put it, freed people could not buy ground that would accrue value, so what they got was floodplain. The Houston and Texas Central reached Dallas the same year, and Miller had bought into the company to route the line past his own property. The isolation that made the community possible also defined it. Joppa sat on unincorporated land the city classed as industrial, and went eighty years with no water, no electricity and no sanitation. Dallas annexed it in October 1955, over the objections of two manufacturers who preferred to stay outside City Hall's reach. Running water reached houses in the mid 1960s and some residents were still using pit toilets in 1977. Some of the earliest Juneteenth observances in Dallas County were held in Joppa, by the community's own account, and it has kept one ever since. The Texas Historical Commission granted a marker in 2015. Roughly three hundred homes remain, walled in by the rail yard, heavy industry and the Great Trinity Forest.
Getting there
32.7172, -96.7439
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