Reedy Chapel A.M.E. Church faces you at 2013 Broadway in Galveston, founded in 1848 by enslaved African Americans. This is a site born of courage: the congregation was founded in 1848 by enslaved African Americans, and after emancipation in 1865 the church was organized as Texas’s first A.M.E. congregation in 1866. On June 19, 1865 this was one of the locations where Union general Gordon Granger publicly read General Order No. 3, the official declaration of emancipation in Texas — an event that is remembered every year in the Juneteenth holiday.
The congregation’s first permanent building rose here in 1863 but was lost in the 1885 Galveston Fire. The current building dates to 1886 and carries the name of the congregation’s second pastor, Reverend Houston Reedy, who began hosting the church’s first annual conferences in 1867. The community’s endurance has been recognized: the church became a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1975 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, updated in 1984.
Picture Reverend Houston Reedy hosting the first annual conferences in 1867, inside the building raised here in 1886.