After the Civil War, Major-General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston on June 19, 1865, in command of a large contingent of Federal troops and issued General Order No. 3 announcing that all slaves in Texas were free, an event later remembered as Juneteenth. Union soldiers then spread across the state to deliver the news and begin enforcement of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, beginning a profound social transformation. While many freedmen stayed on former plantations as sharecroppers and farmworkers, thousands immediately set out on the roads. Most freedmen from plantations along the upper Brazos River traveled east on the San Felipe Trail toward Houston, passing this location. As the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph observed on June 30, 1865, they traveled on foot carrying heavy burdens of clothing and blankets on their heads during a long and weary journey, arriving tired, footsore, and hungry. Many stopped at what was then Houston's western edge, one and one-quarter miles west of the courthouse, where Freedmantown was soon established just north of San Felipe Road, now West Dallas Street, and became the nucleus of a thriving Fourth Ward community.