BELL CHAPEL, TEXAS. Bell Chapel is on Farm Road 353 eighteen miles southeast of Center in southern Shelby County. The predominantly black community was evidently established after the Civil War and was named for a local church. In the mid-1930s Bell Chapel had a church, a school, and a number of houses. The school closed around the time of World War II, but in the early 1990s a church and a few scattered houses still remained in the area.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Charles E. Tatum, Shelby County: In the East Texas Hills (Austin: Eakin, 1984).
