Mount Pilgrim

Mount Pilgrim is on Caney Creek a mile off Farm Road 457 and nine miles east of Bay City in east central Matagorda County. In 1904 a one-teacher Mount Pilgrim school served forty-nine black students, and in 1917 Mount Pilgrim was one of at least nine black schools, all teaching four grades, in what was then school district number one, known as the Sexton district. Though the districting changed, the Mount Pilgrim school still existed as late as 1927, when it had seven grades. By 1937 records were no longer available for the Mount Pilgrim school, which may have been consolidated with that of Van Vleck. A 1952 map shows the Mount Pilgrim church, a Williams cemetery located a third of a mile to the southeast, and widely dispersed dwellings, most of them abandoned. The Mount Pilgrim Church was labeled on the 1989 county highway map.