FRIENDSHIP, TEXAS (Delta County). Friendship is at the junction of two dirt roads just south of Klondike and west of Honey Creek in southwestern Delta County. The area was settled as early as 1889 when the Friendship Baptist Church sent a delegate to a Delta County Baptist Association meeting. By the mid-1890s the Friendship School reported fifty-three black students and one teacher. In 1936 the community had the school, the church, a cemetery, and twenty-five dwellings, but was not identified on maps. In 1964 it had the Free Hope Church and a few scattered homes. By 1970 local children attended school in the Cooper Independent School District. In the early 1980s the church and cemetery remained at the site. The construction of the Cooper dam on the South Sulphur River in the late 1980s necessitated the relocation of Friendship Cemetery out of the floodplain to County Road 2020. With impoundment in 1991, much of the area was flooded by the waters of Cooper Lake.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Melissa M. Green, Duane E. Peter, and Donna K. Shepard, Friendship: An African-American Community on the Prairie Margin of Northeast Texas (Plano, Texas: Geo-Marine, Inc., June 1996 Wilma Ross and Billie Phillips, Photos and Tales of Delta County (1976).
