By Chris Gray,
Gulf coast reporter
June 16, 2024
Galveston will play host to any number of Juneteenth celebrations over the next week, both public and private, but it’s hard to imagine any will have more feeling or pure soul than the services at Reedy Chapel. The modest but architecturally significant structure at Broadway and 20th Street isn’t nicknamed “The Mother Church of Texas” for nothing.
Reedy’s origins date to 1848, when the southern branch of the Methodist Episcopal Church, a forerunner of the United Methodist Church, underwent a schism over slavery that separated the island’s white and black congregations. The church’s (white) trustees purchased the property, erected a building, and operated it as a “mission church” ministering to the island’s enslaved population, said Roy Collins III, who will give a lecture entitled History of Juneteenth in Galveston at 11 a.m. Saturday at the Rosenberg Library.
After the Civil War, “the story with Reedy Chapel was that [the trustees] had no interest in giving title to the people from the north who had been the victors,” he said. “They would rather sell it to the former enslaved people, and that's what occurred.”
Because it stands a few blocks away from the old county courthouse, Reedy became one of the first places on the island where General Order No. 3, the U.S. Army edict officially ending slavery in Texas, was read aloud. It was, current pastor Rev. Lernette Patterson told Houston Public Media last year, “the first documented celebration of Juneteenth on the island of Galveston.”
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