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Black History tour homes in downtown Houston added to UNESCO 'Slave Route Project'

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Published  February 16, 2023 12:16pm CST
Black History Month
FOX 26 Houston

HOUSTON - This Black History Month, the Heritage Society is making the public aware of some historic houses in Houston.

There is a Black History tour in downtown Houston at the Historical Society considered as important to the community. Due to its significance, it's been added to UNESCO's "Slave Route Project".

Martha Goddard is the great-granddaughter of Jack Yates, whose 1870 house is part of the Black History Tour at the Heritage Society in Downtown Houston. She lived in the house herself.

"Yes, until I was 12 yrs old. It didn't look like this though. When the house was donated by my mother and her five daughters to the Historical Society, they put the house back to what it looked like in the 1870s," Goodard told me.

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The Kellum-Noble House is another home on the tour and dates back to 1847. The home is said to be the oldest house in Houston.

"It was a plantation at one time. With slaves. It's been in the same location since 1847 and the six or seven slaves they had here worked for the Kellum family. They made bricks," Goodard explains about the home.

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Another home on the Black History tour, the 1866 Fourth Ward Cottage, is similar to what people know as a row house.

"It was a shotgun house at first where you could go through the front door and go out the back door. And then they added to it, to make it into this cottage. As they added children they could add to it. Now, it was one of those built after Emancipation," said Goodard.

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Cottages such as the 1866 Fourth Ward became the first home for a slave who had just been freed. "If somebody was on a plantation and decided to come here to Houston to live, this would be a house that they would be able to rent or lease," Goodard shared.

The three homes are considered historical gems and have been added to UNESCO's Sites of Memory "Slave Route Project".

"It gives the outside world the opportunity of learning what happened to slaves here in Texas," Goddard said. "When we started with the house in 1847, and now we're here in the 1870s. It just shows you what happened when they originally came and lived in cabins that we visited and once they were emancipated what we'd find here."