West Chapel

West Chapel is 1½ miles southeast of Newsome in western Camp County. It grew up around a black church and school organized sometime between 1876 and 1885. One of the early leaders of the community was Richard A. Caldwell, who obtained 400 acres of land in the area shortly after the Civil War. Caldwell, the father of eighteen children, took an active interest in church and school affairs. In 1885 he purchased an 800-pound bronze bell made in West Point, New York, for the church and school building. He was also active in experimental agriculture and is said to have planted the first commercial peach orchard and constructed the first syrup mill in Camp County. By 1897 the ungraded school served a scholastic population of sixty-six black children. During the late 1930s the population of the area began to decline, as Camp County farmers gradually abandoned cotton production for livestock. By 1935 the school had been consolidated with another common school district, and by 1955 all the schools in the area had been consolidated with the Pittsburg Independent School District. In 1983 West Chapel had a church, a cemetery, and a few widely scattered houses.