Globe Hill

Globe Hill is on a gravel road two miles east of Giddings and 1½ miles north of State Highway 290 in southeastern Lee County. George Coleman Truitt, founder of this predominantly black settlement, bought land in the area and built at least nine box houses there for his tenant farmers. Truitt also ran the community's only business, a general store. In 1887 Truitt and Simon P. Davis selected a school site on a rock promontory called Rocky Hill, for which Truitt named the community. He later renamed the settlement Globe Hill. Truitt donated the land for the school and later provided the site for a cemetery. The schoolhouse, completed in November 1887, was also used for church services. In the spring of 1889 it was enlarged to accommodate the growing student population. Students from Jones Colony and Dockery began transferring to the Globe Hill school, and by 1908 it had an enrollment of at least forty-six. The Globe Hill Baptist Church was built in 1912 and still stood in the mid-1980s; at one time it had 200 members. A four-room Rosenwald School was eventually built across from the church. Globe Hill began to decline in the late 1930s, as the agricultural economy changed and families moved away. By the mid-1980s it had essentially been abandoned, but some former residents still returned to the church on the second Sunday of every month and attended an annual homecoming dinner on the second Sunday of each July.

Adapted from the official Handbook of Texas, a state encyclopedia developed by the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA). It is an authoritative source of trusted historical records.