Cox's Freedom ColonyGause School for Colored ChildrenProfessor Doyle Sheldon Smith
Before emancipation was law, freedom was already practiced in Anglo homes and colonies of (FPOCs) Free People of Color. The Burton and Smith families — yeoman elite Anglo settlers of Milam County — donated land and building to free kin. This clan built their own original freedom colony. What they planted became a church, community center & historic school. What it became next... Made history.
Cox's Freedom Colony.
Family First —Despite Color—Can't Be Denied
The Burton, Smith, Malone families of Milam County Texas, were not simply generous neighbors. They were blood relatives and many were free people of color in hiding long before emancipation. Oral history highlights the land & original church building were passed on by Anglo kin. Despite the harsh reality of slavery some Anglo yeoman, were bound by blood, even when the law refused to acknowledge it. What they gave, they gave to their own. The land donation for the school likely came from this broader Smith Burton network, given their documented ownership and leadership in Cox's and Smith Bottom.
This is the truth the record tries to obscure. The Foundational Gift was not charity from strangers. It was an act of kinship — a recognition, however imperfect under the brutal architecture of slavery, that the people in the Gause community were not property to be discarded when freedom came. They were family and family comes first.
The gift predates Reconstruction. It predates the Freedmen's Bureau. Alongside the land and building, the Burton and Smith families helped their kin found the Baptist and Methodist church communities that would anchor the Freedom Colony — the same faith institutions that gave Doyle Sheldon Smith the foundation he needed to build a school that lasted a century.
It is one of the clearest examples in the historical record of pre-emancipation community infrastructure donated (formally & informal) by yeoman elite families — to and for their own blood kin —and free people of color kept well hidden in East Central Texas.
Mestizo Families · Multiple Religious Denominations
The Burton Line
The Burtons came to Milam County carrying Methodist faith — and blood ties to the free people of color in the Gause community. Their contribution to the Freedom Colony was both material and moral: land, a building, and the Methodist church community they helped their kin establish. The Methodist tradition emphasized education and social uplift, and the Burtons lived that conviction for the family members the law refused to name as such.
The Smith Line
The Smiths brought Baptist conviction and the same blood ties — their kin among the free people of color were family, and they helped them found the Baptist church community that anchored the Freedom Colony. That foundation made everything that followed possible. Doyle Sheldon Smith, son of Professor Frank Smith, would go on to serve forty years as principal, teacher, and coach of Gause Black School — building on the very institution his family helped create.
The Malone Line
The Malones do not fit neatly into one pew. Their story is the story of a people whose ethnogenesis — shaped by Indigenous roots, frontier survival, and generations of cultural layering — left them scattered across every branch of the Christian tree. Catholic. Baptist. Methodist. Pentecostal. And yes, even Proto-Orthodox.
Old Man Malone himself carried Catholic roots — a thread that runs quietly through the family long before the Baptist and Methodist revivals swept East Texas. As the Malones dispersed, so did their faith expressions. What remained constant was not a denomination — it was the cross itself. Through every branch, every migration, every reclassification the state tried to impose on them, the Malones remained a Christian people. That is the one thing no census taker, no blood-quantum law, and no act of erasure could take from them.
"Different altars. Same God. Same blood."
The Churches That Held It Together
Before emancipation was law, these congregations were already practicing freedom. The four oldest documented African American churches in Milam County — Zion Hill Baptist, Mt. Tabor Baptist, Allen Chapel AME, and Rising Star Baptist — were not just houses of worship. They were schools, mutual aid societies, and the places where families gathered by candlelight for the historic Night Watches, waiting in prayer for the Emancipation Proclamation and the 14th Amendment to make law what God had already declared.
"The church was not where they went on Sunday. It was where they lived."
How a Community Gathering Place Became a School
Freedom Colonies were not born from legislation. They were born from necessity — clusters of Black and free-colored families who pooled land, labor, and faith to build something the state would not build for them. Cox's Freedom Colony in the Gause area of Milam County was one of these places.
The land and building gave the colony its institutional anchor. What began as a gathering place — for worship, for community meetings, for the informal education that free people of color had always sought — formalized over time into the Gause School for Colored.
The transition was not a single moment. It was a generation of work. Reconstruction brought new legal frameworks but also violent resistance. The school survived because the community around it — and the families who had gifted its foundation — refused to let it fail.
By the time the Freedmen's Bureau and later state education systems began acknowledging Black schools, the Gause School was already standing. It did not wait for permission. It was built by people who understood that education is how a people survive erasure.
The Arc of the Institution
Blood gave to blood. The Burton and Smith yeoman elite — blood relatives of the free people of color in Gause — provided land, a building, and helped found the Baptist and Methodist church communities that anchored the Freedom Colony.
The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments change the legal landscape. The Freedom Colony formalizes. The church communities the families built together become the institutional backbone of the transition.
The gathering place becomes a recognized school. Professor Frank Smith — father of Doyle Sheldon Smith — carries the educator's title in this same community, passing the legacy to the next generation.
Son of Professor Frank Smith, Doyle Sheldon Smith begins a forty-year span as principal, teacher, and coach of Gause Black School. He oversees construction of the first Black school building in 1937. He retires in 1966.
Doyle carried a Smith name, but his grandmother was Nancy Burton — daughter of Cyrus Burton (b. 1834, NC), the same Cyrus Burton who is the 3rd great-grandfather of researcher Cyndal Malone Provenzano. The 1880 Milam County census lists Nancy Burton, age 18, in Cyrus's household. In 1884 she married John Henry Smith. Their son Frank Smith married Mollie Hodge — and Doyle was their child. The 1900 Lee County census places John Henry & Nancy (Burton) Smith, their son Frank, and Cyrus Burton himself just two houses apart — the families never separated. The blood that funded this school and the blood that ran it were the same blood. Doyle Sheldon Smith was Burton kin. The record says so.
The descendants of Cox's Freedom Colony will return to Gause, Texas — to stand on the ground their people never truly left. This is not a visit. It is a homecoming.
Doyle Sheldon Smith
Son of Professor Frank Smith and Mollie Hodge Smith, Doyle Sheldon Smith was born into the very legacy his family had helped build. His father carried the title of Professor — a title earned in the same community the Smiths had helped found. Doyle would spend his life honoring that inheritance.
His teaching career began in Lee County schools. In 1926, he began a forty-year span as principal, teacher, and coach of Gause Black School — the direct institutional descendant of Cox's Freedom Colony. He was principal when the first Black school building was constructed in 1937. He retired in 1966.
The community remembered him as a Christian in full communion, humanitarian, philosopher, philanthropist, benevolent, loyal, and peacemaker. His concern for his family, students, teachers, and mankind was described as unsurpassed. He is buried at Peaceful Rest Cemetery, Gause, Texas.
A road in Gause still bears his name — Prof. Smith — a living honorific that has outlasted the school building, the Reconstruction era, and a century of erasure. The community remembered. The record remembers. And now, so does this page.
"The Burtons Smiths & Malone's championed education. Combined, 8 generations benefitted"
— Cyndal Malone Provenzano, Legacy Preservation Project
The Roads of Gause
These roads carried the Burtons, the Smiths, and their kin. They still run through the land where Cox's Freedom Colony stood.
The Land Remembers
The Little River and the Sugarloaf Bridge mark the edges of the world the Burton and Smith families built. This is Tonkawa Land. The Malones never left and navigated the complex hidden caverns by the sun.
Tonkawa — We All Stay Together.
Peaceful Rest Cemetery
The Freedom Colony cemetery. Historically called the Negro Cemetery, the Colored Cemetery, the Family Cemetery. The names changed. The ground did not.
Peaceful Rest Cemetery is the Freedom Colony cemetery of Gause, Texas. It is still maintained. It is still standing. The gate is open.
Buried here: African, Free People of Color, and Mestizo triracial lines — The full spectrum of what this community was. The record tried to sort them into categories. The ground holds them together.
Doyle Sheldon Smith — forty years of service to Gause Black School, principal, teacher, coach — is buried here.
Gause was home to 20 Freedom Colonies. Texas had more than 570 across the state — the highest concentration of any state in the nation. Walter Moses Burton is buried at Fort Bend County, not Gause. History labeled the sacred ground, the NEGRO Cemetery. The colony called it the family cemetery. Very well hidden & still maintained
Returning to Gause
In October 2026, The Tonkawa Indians who stayed who are tecnically classified as "Black" and Mestezo (The Malones) the family will return to Gause, Texas — to the land where the Burtons Malones and Smiths, built something that outlasted slavery, Reconstruction, and a century of erasure. This is a reunion. A homecoming. The descendants of Cox's Freedom Colony coming back to stand on the ground their people never truly left.