4um: Historic black community in Chesterfield struggles against encroaching development

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Title: Historic black community in Chesterfield struggles against encroaching development
Source: STL Post
URL Source: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/ ... 14-5264-9c07-ce86f231001e.html
Published: Aug 31, 2015
Author: Steve Giegerich
Post Date: 2015-08-31 20:40:56 by Dakmar
Keywords: None
Views: 31
Comments: 2

Westland Acres in 1966
Post-Dispatch file photo
Mrs. Henry Frazier and her son Harold stand at the gate of their home in April 1966, in Westland Acres. The community was named for Mrs. Frazier's grandfather, William West, a slave who bought 160 acres of hill country when he was emancipated. In 100 years, in 1966, the land had been divided into small tracts on which 109 people lived. Post-Dispatch file photo.
CHESTERFIELD • Rare was the day that Edith Marie Thompson was apart from the land her family settled 39 years before she entered the world in 1918.
It was on the property once known by some as “The Hill” and others as “Little Africa,” that Thompson and her husband, Robert, began a family that stretching into the next century grew from seven children to 21 grandchildren, 58 great-grandchildren and 47 great-great-grandchildren.
And it was there, surrounded by loved ones and friends, that Marie Thompson drew her final breath on Aug. 10.
By the time of her death at age 96, the corner of Chesterfield where Thompson lived and died had long since rechristened itself “Westland Acres,” an homage to the freed slave — Thompson’s great-great grandfather — who in 1879 bought 150 acres of what has become prime real estate.
Legend has it that William West paid $5 an acre for the land that has housed his extended family and scores of descendants.
“A freed slave had a vision of what he wanted for his family, followed through with it and the legacy has lasted 139 years,” said Daniel Gonzalez, historian with the St. Louis County Parks Department. “It’s an incredible story.”
The story may be drawing to an end.
As recently as the 1980s more than 50 families resided along narrow, hilly, winding Church Road.
The country lane is the only way in and out of Westland Acres. It ends, symbolically, at the Union Baptist Church and cemetery, a graveyard with headstones that provide a timeline of the West lineage.
Today, 10 families remain. The death of Marie Thompson reduced the total population to 28.
Almost all are older adults struggling to pay property taxes inflated by the construction of homes with prices in the high-six figures (or more), that now surround their outpost.
“I paid $5,000 last year and I had to save like crazy,” said resident Doris Frazier.
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#1. To: Dakmar (#0)
Property tax appraisal districts are unholy criminal enterprises.
Trust me, they truly are.
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” ~ H. L. Mencken
Lod posted on 2015-08-31 21:12:42 ET Reply Trace Private Reply
#2. To: Dakmar (#0)
((after seeing the photo))

Pick up the debris in the yard, paint the window shutters, do some landscaping.
“With the exception of Whites, the rule among the peoples of the world, whether residing in their homelands or settled in Western democracies, is ethnocentrism and moral particularism: they stick together and good means what is good for their ethnic group."
-Alex Kurtagic
X-15 posted on 2015-08-31 21:26:54 ET Reply Trace Private Reply
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