Information about Buxton, Iowa by Rachelle Chase
In 2022, I was honored to be included in the following documentaries, talking about Buxton. The African American Midwest: A 500 Year Fight for Freedom As stated in “The 1539 Project: Why Black Midwest and Iowa history matters,” producers of “The African American Midwest” hope to show that the Midwest is not only America’s geographic […]
“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 […]
I recently became a deltiologist. This new obsession is thanks to John Taylor, who introduced me to the word, and to John Taylor and John Jacobs who have shared their knowledge, fun of postcard collecting, and fascinating postcards. Both are among those who have allowed me to include their rare Buxton images in my books. […]
“At a revival we used to have, I remember this little boy was preaching,” said Gertrude Stokes, an African American resident of Buxton, Iowa. “He used to wear a little white robe. He ran our revival and that’s when I joined the church.” The little boy was eight-year-old Lonnie Lawrence Dennis. On November 16, 1902, […]
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 […]
In 2017 and 2018, I traveled throughout Iowa speaking about Buxton, Iowa and why it was a coal mining town ahead of its time. Marshalltown Community Television/McTV aired my May 2018 presentation, which was held at the Marshalltown Public Library. New 2019 presentations with information from my new book, CREATING THE BLACK UTOPIA OF BUXTON, […]
Senator Cory Booker included Buxton, Iowa—the integrated coal mining town of 5,000 where, in 1900, blacks and whites were treated equal—in his talks this past weekend. In his keynote speech at Friday’s Iowa Democratic Party Fall Gala, he mentioned the black and white women of Buxton who’d quilted together. “Those women knew what we must […]