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 ^qv 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, ^qv 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).