Voices of Camptown: Untold Stories from a Freedom Colony

By Charles Swenson, with Tina Henderson, Ph.D., and Robert R. Bubb, Ph.D.

After a decade restoring the Camptown Cemetery in Brenham, Texas, the state’s oldest established Black graveyard, Charles Swenson researched the names he found there, developing a narrative of the freedom colony. The cemetery becomes not just a place where bodies are buried, but a testament to the people whose lives are immortalized there. The voices that emerge span a period where many were considered property, through the Civil War period, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and on into the inequities of the Jim Crow period.

Voices of Camptown reveals the overlooked history of the “Birthplace of Texas Independence”—where half the population received their independence only following the Civil War.