Texana is a small community
located high on a mountain about a mile from the town of Murphy
in the Great Smoky Mountain region of North Carolina. It was named
for a black woman named Texana McClelland, who moved with her
family to the area around the 1850s. One of the first things that
community members did when they settled in Texana was build a
community church. The First Baptist Church in Texana was built
of logs, hewn by the women who had moved into the settlement.
In 1881, the community tore down the old church and built Mt.
Zion Baptist Church, which is still the church of the community
today.
School was traditionally
very important to members of the Texana community. Since black
children were not allowed to attend school with white children
in the early 1900s, classes were first held for them in the church
until a small one-room schoolhouse was built. In the 1920s, a
two-room school building was built. Even as late as 1958, Cherokee
County did not have a high school for black residents, but in
September 1965, the Texana School and Murphy schools were integrated.
The black students who were in the elementary grades went to Murphy
Elementary School, and those who were high school age went to
Murphy High School.
Today, Texana has about
153 residents, most of whom live along Texana Road on the same
mountain hillside where Texana McClelland first lived. Although
Texanans live in the Great Smoky Mountains of Appalachia –
an area that is primarily populated by white folks and Native
Americans – they have not forgotten about the diversity
that Texana McClelland brought to her mountain community. Each
year at homecoming, community members gather at the church to
read the biography of Texana and recount stories of early life
in the community. Residents have always viewed Texana as a strong
black community, and a few years ago community members began an
oral history and quilt project in order to preserve stories of
kinship and history in the community.
Texana residents are
proud to live in or come from Texana. Everyone in the community
considers each other friends and family, and residents are very
welcoming to outsiders and visitors as well. The friendliness
and hospitality of these residents, their respect for the traditions
of the past, and their strong bonds with each other make Texana
a prime community site for conducting oral history interviews.
Since summer of 2002, fieldworkers with the North Carolina Language
and Life Project have recorded over 40 hours of speech with different
residents. As we work with more members of this unique community
in the future, our goal is to continue to record and preserve
their heritage and traditions, as reflected in their speech.
For further
information about the Texana oral history project, contact Becky
Childs (rlchilds@uga.edu) or Christine Mallinson (clmallin@sa.ncsu.edu).
For further reading about the history of the Texana community,
see A Pictorial History of Cherokee County (Cherokee County Historical
Museum, 1995) and A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins (Perennial
Press., 2001).
