Grove Hill

Grove Hill was at the intersection of Farm roads 1301 and 1728, on Caney Creek around the site of what is now Pledger some fourteen miles northeast of Bay City in northeastern Matagorda County. The predominantly black community was at a site near the Brown Plantation homesite and may have been inhabited by plantation-working slaves before the Civil War. It was centered around the Grove Hill church, which also served as a school. By 1894 the Grove Hill school reported between fifty and seventy black students, and by 1904 it had one teacher and seventy-five students. Grove Hill is not labeled on the 1936 or 1989 county highway maps, but during the 1980s a Grove Hill church and cemetery remained in the Pledger community.