EAST LIBERTY, TEXAS. East Liberty is on State Highway 87 fourteen miles southeast of Center in southeastern Shelby County. The predominantly black community received its name in 1888 when the Rev. Jeff Goodwin organized the East Liberty Baptist Church there. The church and school community, located in an area populated mainly by landowning black farmers, also periodically had a general store. The first school in the settlement was called Chinquapin for a huge chinquapin tree that grew in the schoolyard. In 1899 the community's school served twenty children, and by 1938 the school was operated by the Boles school district and had 137 students. In 1965 East Liberty had a twelve-room school with sixteen teachers and an enrollment of 337. By 1984 the school had been consolidated with the Shelbyville school district, and its building, which maps for the mid-1980s showed as the only structure at the site, stood vacant.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Charles E. Tatum, Shelby County: In the East Texas Hills (Austin: Eakin, 1984).
