Information about Buxton, Iowa by Rachelle Chase
Rarely do I find photos of Buxton I’ve never seen before. Rarer still do I find them in my inbox. But today I did, thanks to Alisa Corstorphine. “I didn’t know if they were unique but I knew they were important,” said Alisa, referring to the Buxton images. After going through her mother’s photos and […]
Available now at Amazon, Arcadia Publishing, Barnes & Noble and more! I’m excited to announce CREATING THE BLACK UTOPIA OF BUXTON, IOWA—published by The History Press—was released January 28, 2019. While LOST BUXTON, my 2017 release published by Arcadia Publishing, was a pictorial history of Buxton told primarily in the words of former residents and newspaper […]
Juneteenth, celebrated on June 19th, commemorates the end of slavery—specifically, June 19, 1865, the day Union soldiers traveled through Galveston, Texas announcing that the Civil War had ended and enslaved African Americans were free. While I have not yet found any indication of Juneteenth celebrations in Buxton, I discovered that Buxton residents (and other Iowans) […]
Recently, protestors have begun demanding to defund or abolish police departments. Today, as I watched Trevor Noah on “The Daily Show” recap the changes that have already begun as a result of the protests, I was surprised to learn what was happening in Minneapolis. The Minneapolis City Council is already looking to disband its police […]
While anxiously awaiting Netflix’s release of “Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madame C.J. Walker,” the question popped into my head, “Had Madam C.J. Walker ever visited Buxton, Iowa?” The question was a plausible one. People—especially African Americans—beyond Iowa had heard of this amazing town. Buxton was a coal mining town of 5,000 residents […]
Lottie Armstrong Baxter, a daughter of successful African American businessman Hobe Armstrong, was born in Muchakinock, Iowa in March 1876. When she was fifteen, she graduated from a business school and began her career with the Consolidation Coal Company, first working as a secretary for superintendent J.E. Buxton. On February 27, 1901, she married John […]
Robert Wells is the creator and administrator of the Preserving An American Icon in Oskaloosa Facebook page. He started the page about three years ago to preserve the square in Oskaloosa. After the page, along with a petition and emails sent to Oskaloosa Main Street and the Oskaloosa Chamber of Commerce, were instrumental in saving […]
“Hi! This is United States Senator Cory Booker with one of the great authors I know in my life, Ms. Chase, because she’s writing books about my family’s history. Not my particular family, but about Buxton, a town here in Iowa that greeted my family from poverty from Alabama that gave us promise and possibility.” […]
While researching how African Americans ended up being 55% of the population in Buxton, Iowa—which was established by Consolidation Coal Company—I did not expect to discover that one of the men who’d recruited African Americans to work in the company’s mines was Major Thomas Shumate, a Confederate officer. Within five to six years of establishing […]