After the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished, freed blacks in Montgomery County worked to build successful family and community life during Reconstruction from 1865 to 1877. African Americans established churches, created schools, and formed social organizations and clubs that supported their developing communities, while wages from their labor helped them invest in homes, farms, and businesses. Churches stood at the center of freedmen settlements, and in Montgomery County these congregations were chiefly Protestant, especially Methodist and Baptist, with at least one Catholic church in Mt. Zion. African American communities also directed money toward education for their children, first holding classes in churches and community lodges. Montgomery County did not fund public schools for African Americans until 1872, when each electoral district received one public facility, and many African Americans still found these schools inadequate because they relied on outdated cast-off textbooks from white schools despite paying property taxes that supported operations. Even with these gains, African Americans in Maryland continued to face racism and increasing segregation, and many whites regarded the growth of freedmen communities with contempt and fear. Such hostility was documented in Montgomery County by the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, including the assault on Philip Brown on March 22, 1866, when a white man shot and wounded him in the head as he rode quietly along the public highway, and Brown heard the assailant's companion say that he was nothing but a Union soldier. Reconstruction also brought wider changes reflected in increased literacy among former slaves, participation in local government, the ability to buy goods with wages earned on the open market, voting rights for African American men after the 1870 ratification of the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and legal marriage after slavery, a change later reflected in former slave Frank Dorsey's pride in his 1893 wedding vows.