In a deposition made in 1919, Reverend Andrew Jackson Hurdle stated he never went to school a day in his life. He considered himself a self-made man who learned to read and write while a slave. Born on Christmas Day 1845, Hurdle was sold at the age of eight in North Carolina to a family moving to Daingerfield, Texas. Family tradition recalled the family had a son with a severe speech defect about the same age as Hurdle who became the boy’s companion, even being with him while the boy’s mother taught her child. Hurdle also went to the Disciples of Christ Church in Daingerfield with the boy and his family.
The Hurdle family believed an overseer whipped Andrew Jackson Hurdle during the Civil War while the father served in the Confederate Army. As a result, Hurdle fled to Louisiana, found friendly Union troops who gave him a job caring for cavalry horses. He proudly kept his blue tunic from the Union Army days for years. After the war, Hurdle returned to the Daingerfield area, site of some of the deadliest Reconstruction violence in the former Confederacy. Former slaves, Union supporters, and Union soldiers became targets of violence for more than five years in Northeast Texas, including Hunt County.
Without a doubt, the dangerous environment, the act of being sold and separated from family at a young age, and his above average intelligence led Hurdle to distrust whites and believe in the ability of former slaves to control their own lives as hard-working individuals. One of his daughters remembered her father as a very independent man who did not allow whites after the war to address him as “Uncle Andy”, as was custom of the day.
Andrew Jackson Hurdle married Vine Jane “Viney” Sanders, the daughter of a slave mother and the master of a plantation in Titus County in 1868. They were parents of seventeen children, three of whom died in infancy. Hurdle stated that all received good educations, owned their own homes, and were never arrested or in legal trouble, all standards Hurdle held in high regard.
Andrew Jackson Hurdle was ordained a Deacon in the Disciples of Christ Church in 1874 and by 1880 he was an ordained preacher. At first the Hurdles made their home in Titus County near Mount Vernon where he paid taxes on one horse in 1873. The next year he paid taxes on the same horse and four cows. Hurdle recalled he rode that horse to churches where he preached throughout Northeast Texas. By 1874 the young family moved to Hunt County, southeast of Greenville.
In an area still known as Center Point, Deacon Hurdle co-founded his first church between 1875 and 1880. A white community of the same name was located nearby, but the former slaves chose to create their community some distance away. Dr. Thad Sitton and Dr. James Conrad described freedmen’s settlements as places where former slaves watched what they said, were careful with white neighbors, and stayed to themselves. Isolation, independence, landownership, and avoidance of whites defined the special nature of Freedom Colonies.
Center Point, like other such Freedom Colonies, placed great importance on maintaining their own independent, self-sustaining schools. As soon as the church was built, the parents in the community worked out a plan for a school to be held during December, January, and February of each year to allow students time for education between planting cotton and corn in spring, tending the crops in summer, and harvesting in the fall. The families purchased three acres of land for a church, a community cemetery, and a school for children. Professor Buffington, the first teacher, enrolled between fifty and seventy children ranging in ages of eight to sixteen. By 1900 the school had grown to accommodate two school building in different locations, one at Center Point and the other less than five miles away in the community of Dixon. Children of Rev. Hurdle served as teachers in both schools.
Sitton and Conrad found that while many rural African American schools were in dilapidated conditions with used books, crowded conditions, and undertrained teachers; there were positives to the schools that were often effective. The good discipline, patient teachers who understood the desire to learn, more time to learn, individualized instructions that allowed work with students at their own speed, and older students who helped younger children with reading and math skills contributed to the spread of education in former slave families. Most students were related, and the family atmosphere fostered good feelings about learning.
In addition to leading the Hunt County community of Center Point, Andrew Jackson Hurdle organized five Disciples of Christ Churches in neighboring communities. At only one of the congregations did he receive a salary, albeit only three dollars per month; at the other four he received free will offerings. Through his efforts seven men entered ministry.
Over time, Reverend Hurdle acquired 140 acres of farmland. Each purchase was made through an “agent” who bought the land for him and whom he later reimbursed. This was customary in northeast Texas where unwritten laws forbade blacks from outright purchase of land until the late 1930s.
After sending his own children to Southern Christian Institute in Edwards, Mississippi, to Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and to Prairie View A&M, Reverend Hurdle felt it time to establish a college for young African Americans supported by the Disciples of Christ Church. However, after 1890, the Christian Women’s Board of Missionaries took charge of such work and refused to allow African Americans to control the funds or church.
In 1901 Reverend Hurdle called for the withdrawal of African American Disciples of Christ Churches from the Texas Christian Missionary Convention and unite with the organization of Northeast Texas Christian Missionary Convention. At a meeting in 1900, Hurdle was elected president of the new convention, a position he held for twelve years. Many African American Disciples of Christ Churches joined the latter group, causing a deeper rift between the two church groups.
As often happened in African American communities and churches, the women who formed the Northeast Texas Christian Missionary Society at the convention went to work raising money through an array of social affairs, including chicken hunts, chitterling suppers, candy pulls, fashion shows, queen contests, brideless weddings, Biblical plays, and other creative affairs. In less than four years, the women raised enough money to purchase forty-nine acres of land valued at $10,000 for the college in Anderson County, one and one-half miles north of Palestine. The site was chosen for its central location in East Texas where the majority of former slaves and their children lived. In 1910 a contract was let, the cornerstone laid in 1911, and the college opened its doors on January 2, 1912.
The first president was D. T. Cleaver; the faculty consisted of a domestic science teacher, an intermediate teacher, and a teacher of history and English. The next year I.Q. Hurdle, son of Reverend A. J. Hurdle became president of the college with five faculty members. While the name implied college level work, the majority of students performed at elementary level.
One student later described the school as more like home than college. Students worked as part of the learning experience. Boys would plow, girls milked cows, and all worked in the garden. Unfortunately, the dormitory-classroom building suspiciously burned in 1920 at the height of the second revival of Ku Klux Klan. The college was financially unable to rebuild. With the establishment of Jarvis College at Hawkins, Texas, the Northeast Texas Christian Theological and Industrial College abandoned the Palestine campus to merge with Jarvis. This led to reunification of the Northeast Texas Convention of the Disciples of Christ and the state convention of churches.
Reverend Andrew Jackson Hurdle did not retire to his Hunt County farm to enjoy the company of these twenty-two children and his old age. After closing the college in Anderson County, he continued to preach and minister to his congregations and encourage young people to continue their education. He passed away in 1935 at the age of ninety, a well-respected African American minister and educator in Northeast Texas.