In January 1860, Edward Palmer purchased 640 acres from David Bright, one of Stephen F. Austin's “Old Three Hundred,” for $6,000 to create the Palmer plantation in Missouri City, Texas, and in October of that year he was elected judge of the 7th Judicial District of Texas. Judge Palmer died in January 1862, and his wife died three years later, leaving the plantation to their 14-year-old daughter, Betty Palmer. As the Civil War came to its conclusion, General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston on June 19, 1865, and officially ended slavery in Texas, a proclamation that became the basis for the annual Juneteenth festivities celebrating the abolition of slavery in the Lone Star State. On an early summer day, the white overseer and Ed Gibbs, Judge Palmer's personal driver and the leader of the enslaved people on the Palmer plantation, gathered all the workers under the branches of this tree and announced their freedom as individuals. They also announced that planting and cultivation would continue and that those who wished could remain on Palmer land to live and work for a share of their crop, and in this way slavery ended on the Palmer plantation beneath the spreading boughs of the Freedom Tree.