Quakertown: a Denton community and its removal

North of the square in Denton, between Withers Street and McKinney Street, Vine Street and Oakland Avenue, there was once a whole community that no longer stands. Quakertown was an African American neighborhood inside the city limits, formed in the 1870s and gone by the 1920s. What follows is how it began, what it held, and how the city bought the land out from under it.

A neighborhood with edges you can still walk

Start with the boundaries, because they are the most concrete thing the record gives you. Quakertown ran from Withers Street on the north to McKinney Street on the south, and from Vine Street on the east to Oakland Avenue on the west. That is a defined piece of ground inside Denton, in central Denton County, not a settlement on the prairie miles from town.

The name most likely comes from the northern Quakers who aided freedmen in the early years of Reconstruction. The record says "most likely," and it is worth keeping that hedge. Nobody has handed down a document that settles the naming, so the Quaker connection stays the best explanation rather than a proven one.

Why families moved there from Freeman Town

Quakertown began to form as a separate community within the Denton city limits by the mid-1870s. Black families came to it from Freeman Town, the first black settlement in Denton. The pull was a school: a black school opened in Quakertown in 1878, and families relocated to be near it. A household that appears in Freeman Town in one record and in Quakertown in the next did not necessarily move far. It moved toward a school.

The first school building burned down in 1913. It was rebuilt in 1915. Two dates, a fire and a rebuilding, and nothing in the record about what happened in the two years between. If your family's children were of school age in that gap, the page does not say where they went.

What stood on those blocks by the 1880s

By the 1880s Quakertown had a number of stores and churches, and several communal organizations, including the Masons, the Odd Fellows, and the Knights of Pythias. Those lodges were not decoration. They served as centers of community life, which is the phrase the record uses, and it points at something a family historian can use. A lodge is a record keeper. If a Quakertown man belonged to the Masons or the Odd Fellows, there may be a membership roll, a dues book, a burial notice, an obituary read into minutes. The churches kept their own minutes too. For a community that left few property records in its own name, the fraternal and church paper trail is often the first place a name surfaces.

The community also had a doctor. E. D. Moten, the only black doctor in Denton in the early 1900s, lived in Quakertown. His full name was Edwin D. Moten, born in 1875 and died in 1955, and he lived in Denton from 1907 to 1919. A collection of his family photographs and his personal and business correspondence survives, held by the University of North Texas Libraries and running to 96 items across two types of material. It covers six decades and ten counties, so the Denton years sit inside a wider record rather than filling it.

How a bond election ended a neighborhood

The end came through city business, conducted in the open and on the record. In March 1921 a petition was presented at the Denton city commission meeting to hold a bond election to purchase all the land encompassed by Quakertown and turn it into a city park. The bond election passed. In May 1922 the city of Denton began to purchase Quakertown properties.

Residents were given a choice. They could sell their land and property outright, or have their houses moved to Solomon Hill, a site on the other side of the railroad tracks selected by the city. The choice was between cash and a house on a new lot, and either way the ground under the community changed hands. Quakertown soon disappeared.

Did the houses move, or only the people?

This is where the record thins out, and it is worth being honest about the thinning. The page does not say how many households chose to sell and how many chose to move, how many houses were actually relocated to Solomon Hill, or what became of the stores and the church buildings. It does not give the purchase prices, the size of the bond, or the vote count. Those are the questions a local researcher would ask next, and the answers are not in the entry. That gap is not a dead end. It is a list of things to look for elsewhere: city commission minutes for 1921 and 1922, the bond records, deed transfers out of Quakertown owners' names, and whatever the Denton papers printed while it was happening.

The railroad tracks matter in that geography. Solomon Hill sat on the other side of them, which means the move was not only a change of address but a change of side.

Where do the names of Quakertown families survive?

Deeds are the obvious place to start, because the city purchased the properties one by one and each purchase left a transfer. Probate records can name heirs who had already scattered. Census returns put households on those blocks in the years before the purchase and then somewhere else after it. Cemetery lists connect a name to a burial ground even when the house is gone. Church and lodge records catch the families who held office, paid dues, or buried their dead through an organization.

Photographs are the other half. The Moten collection at the University of North Texas Libraries holds family photographs alongside the correspondence, which means some Quakertown faces survive even though the blocks do not. For readers who want the full account of the community, its boundaries, and its disappearance, the Handbook of Texas entry is the place to go, and it is where the dates in this article come from.

What the record leaves open

Quakertown existed for roughly fifty years inside the city of Denton, had its own stores, churches and lodges, produced the only black doctor in town, and was purchased out of existence by a bond election that passed in 1921 and a buying program that opened in May 1922. The outline is firm. The interior is not. Who lived in each house, what each family chose when the choice was offered, and where the buildings went are questions the surviving record has not answered yet, and they are the questions that turn a neighborhood into a set of names.

If your family appears in Denton before 1922 and then on the other side of the tracks, go looking for the transfer. The city bought the land, and a purchase leaves a paper trail with a name on it.

The county's ground is drawn under the shape of the county, and the communities that thinned out in the same years are followed under communities that fell off the map.

The Blackland Chronology editorial team
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