Juliette Street Archaeological Project
Dallas, Texas

Although the city of Dallas was founded in 1841, Freedman's Town was created immediately after Emancipation as a separate settlement adjacent to the town of Dallas, but still well outside its limits so as to escape harsh vagrancy laws specifically targeting freedmen. By the close of Reconstruction, when it was incorporated into Dallas proper, Freedman's Town contained at least 500 citizens. By the late 19th century, the area was known as the North Dallas Freedman's Town.

Within what remains of the old North Dallas Freedman's Town, the most intact portion available for excavation is a single block of Juliette Street, a street that no longer really exists, save as a grassy field.

Juliette Street had always been exclusively African-American, and was one of the earliest sections of the old Freedman's Town, incorporated into the city of Dallas at the close of Reconstruction in 1874. The first home constructed on Juliette was built at this time, and by the 1890s, this little block held 16 homes, two businesses, and two churches.

By the early 1960s, however, virtually all of these elements were gone, torn down for the construction of Woodall Rodgers Expressway, the last multilane highway to decimate the community. After its destruction, nothing was ever built on the block, with most of the now vacant lot used as green-space adjacent to the highway's frontage road system.

Of all the structures that once lined this block, St. Paul United Methodist Church is the only survivor, and its congregation and ministry are still very active. Saint Paul was founded at its present location in the summer of 1873, with services first held in a simple brush arbor. The present day Gothic style brick structure, was begun in 1901, and finally completed in 1925.

Between June 5 and July 15 of 2002, we focused our efforts on a former house lot adjacent to, and owned by, the church. A series of working class African American families resided on this property from its initial purchase in 1880 to 1962, when the structure was razed and the lot purchased by the church.

This site, named the Cole site for one of the first families to reside there, is extremely small, measuring only 23 feet by 87 feet in extent. By every measure, the Cole House appears to have been a classic shotgun house, likely with three rooms and no hall to connect them.

Based on Sanborn Insurance maps, and comparisons to this shotgun house currently preserved at Dallas's Old City Park, the Cole House stood approximately 43 feet in length, and only 12 feet in width. This example was built in 1906. Its three rooms were occupied by several Black families throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

As the name of the site might suggest, the longest occupation was by the Cole Family from 1886 to 1910, or for some 25 years.

Within this tiny shot gun house resided Thomas Cole and his wife Nora, and it was here that their four daughters were born and raised Henrietta, Della, Sallie, and Viola. Both Thomas and Nora were born into slavery in Texas during the Civil War, while children were all born in the 1880s. Thomas Cole was, depending upon the year, a day laborer, a carpenter, and later, owner of a horse feed and fuel business.

According to the 1900 census and later city directories, Nora did not work outside the home. Fittingly, the entire family attended St. Paul, and Thomas Cole served as a trustee for the church.

Their descendents, Reggie Smith and his mother, Ava Cox, are still members of St. Paul. They shared vital genealogical information on Thomas and Nora and their four daughters, and in turn we were able to reciprocate with information that they lacked. For example, no one in the family remembered that the Coles' ever lived in this house, since the family had moved to a larger home a few blocks up Juliette Street by 1910.