Clarksville families used to fill Sweet Home Missionary Baptist, the little white church on West 11th Street, every Sunday. Most stopped coming as hostile developers turned the once all-Black neighborhood into one of Austin’s wealthiest, and whitest. Homecoming, the church’s annual anniversary celebration, brings them back.
“Sweet Home is the foundation, the hub,” said Ada Bolden, who grew up spending Sundays at the church. “If we don’t do anything else, we’re gonna come home. We’re gonna come to Sweet Home.”
Bolden, known to former Clarksville neighbors as “Lady,” has since moved neighborhoods to Windsor Park and membership to David Chapel Missionary Baptist. When the cost of living in Clarksville began to climb after gentrification took hold in the early Eighties, staying in the neighborhood her ancestors helped build – according to her, the Boldens were the second family of freed slaves to settle the West Austin enclave in the 1870s – was no longer an option. She still comes back to celebrate Sweet Home anniversaries.
On Sunday, the church celebrated 155 years since the Rev. Jacob Fontaine, also the father of Austin’s first Black newspaper, founded Sweet Home. Services began in a home once owned by Buffalo Soldier Hezikiah Haskell, since landmarked by the state of Texas and the city of Austin, before the congregation made a $50 down payment in 1882 for the property the church sits on today. For more than a century, Sweet Home anchored life in Clarksville.
“If you weren’t in the hospital, you were going to be at church,” said Timothy Higgins, a deacon who commutes from East Austin for services. Higgins, whose sister Lenore was one of three Black children to integrate O. Henry Middle School, started going to Sweet Home in 1960 at 8 years old.
In those days, Clarksville was still all Black. The men labored or worked for the city, and the women worked for rich white folks on the other side of Enfield. Everybody knew everybody – Higgins couldn’t get in trouble without the entire neighborhood finding out – and doors stayed unlocked. Sunday meant full pews and church all day, and summer meant Bible study with Mrs. Mays.
“The church was everything to the community,” said Hattie Harris, 77, who still sings in the choir. “Especially for the children. We had nowhere else to go to play, to laugh, to have fun … there were areas we couldn’t go in.”
When the city planned to drive MoPac through the heart of Clarksville in the late Sixties, resistance efforts gathered at Sweet Home. Though that initiative succeeded, driving a third of residents from their homes, further protest kept down plans for a crosstown route that threatened to bury the community completely. The developers that showed up a few years later intent on flipping family homes for big profits also met substantial blowback from prominent figures in the church.
Sunday’s sermons brought lots of talk about solid foundations. The Rev. Steve Manning, particularly spirited for the morning service, invoked Matthew 7:24-25: “Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.”
Manning, raised in Lockhart, started preaching at Sweet Home in 2008. Back then, services drew 50-ish regulars, but skyrocketing property taxes and a number of deaths among the old guard has dwindled attendance to the mid-thirties. None of the regulars still live in Clarksville.
Manning said he worries about the church’s future all the time; operating as a Black church in a nearly all-white neighborhood makes it hard to grow. Restoration efforts, however, have moved forward steadily thanks to donations and money earned from the sale of a piece of the property. Over the past two decades, the 91-year-old building installed new pews, air conditioning, and an accessibility ramp in addition to renovations of the bell tower and the baptismal pool. The bell, whose toll used to announce weddings, deaths, and escaped patients from the nearby veterans hospital, now sits displayed out front.
In the basement, pictures of prominent Sweet Home members line the walls. Elias Mayes went to Sweet Home while he worked as one of few Black legislators in Texas during Reconstruction. “Uncle” Seymour Washington, the unlikely patriarch of Austin’s country hippie scene in the Seventies, sang in the choir, though some say the church wouldn’t let him preach on account of his taste for bourbon. MLB all-star Don Baylor, who integrated O. Henry with Lenore Higgins, led restoration efforts with his wife Becky before his passing in 2017.
During his guest sermon at the afternoon service, the Rev. Joseph McCormick, invited by Manning from Ebenezer Baptist on the Eastside, drew on Sweet Home’s history.
“You’ve done your job of standing tall on the word of God,” McCormick told the congregation. “In the face of segregation, in the face of Jim Crow, in the face of the new Jim Crow, and now in the face of Christian nationalism.”
After the service, smiling faces in matching blue aprons served soul food in the basement. Worshippers now planted all over the city caught up with their former neighbors, and a few children rode bikes outside, where the neighborhood kids used to make their own fun in the summertime. Nobody knows what the future holds, but if there’s one thing this community is going to do, it’s come home.
“Come on Sweet Home,” McCormick urged as he guided his sermon to its apex. “Don’t quit now.”