Park includes site of one of Texas’ first Black churches
SAN ANTONIO — Visitors can now stand in the same spot where worshippers at one of the first Black churches in Texas gathered.
Next to a color-illuminated water wall on the newly completed section of the San Pedro Creek Culture Park is the original 1870s St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church site.
Historical texts will explain that the 100-member congregation made the site its first spiritual home in a small former soap factory in 1871.
“St. James, the first A.M.E. church in San Antonio where African Americans worshipped autonomously and without restrictions imposed by others, became a beacon” in what now is considered the western part of downtown, states text written by a local focus group that will be displayed at the site.
A February 2020 archaeological discovery of the church site and an extensive public involvement process to determine how to preserve it has been “eye-opening,” even while the church was closed during the pandemic, said the Rev. Alvin Smith, the St. James pastor for seven years.
“For us to be part of this cultural park, it really says something about the makeup of San Antonio and its diversity,” Smith said.
The Bexar County Historical Commission was briefed recently on permanent signage for the site on the creek’s east bank. The commission also heard an update on a city initiative to guide preservation of buildings, sites, neighborhoods and customs tied to Black heritage in San Antonio.
“It’s a more equitable form of preservation that we were striving for,” said Claudia Guerra, cultural historian in the city’s Office of Historic Preservation.
The rectangular church site and most of its low exterior walls have been structurally preserved. Visitors can walk on a durable, reinforced composite deck flooring where early St. James members gathered and workers labored to support the town’s budding industrial economy of the 1800s.
The mid-1800s Klemcke-Menger soap factory was “a keystone to modern health and hygiene,” while an 1875 St. James church cornerstone, placed when the church expanded, “remains a tangible landmark of the thriving Reconstructionera African American community.”
The congregants, including some who’d been enslaved, had not had a permanent church home until they secured “the first physical meeting place for African Americans” and the AME Church in San Antonio.
Churches were a societal lifeline for freed Black Texans. St. James’ congregation “stressed political participation, education, civil rights, public service and economic empowerment, with members having served as firefighters, freemasons, postal workers, and college founders,” signs will read in English and Spanish.
The signs, now in production, also will include an 1874 article in the San Antonio Daily Express written by the St. James pastor, the Rev. W.R. Carson. In two years, he performed 85 baptisms and 15 marriages in the church, which had grown to 203 members.
“I shall ever remember the kindness and hospitality that has been extended to me by the citizens of San Antonio, and wish them every blessing,” Carson wrote.
But the church also was at the center of struggles for equality. Black firefighting companies organized at St. James out of necessity.
“White firefighters would not come into our neighborhood. And so they started their own, right there in the church,” Smith said.
Learning those stories has inspired and sometimes challenged today’s St. James congregation, he said.
“Being a lover of history, all of that was really just overwhelming,” he said. “To see how it’s blossomed, and to see the start, looking at that cornerstone, and for the ancestors to know what it’s become today, is tremendous.”