After the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863, African Americans were recruited as United States soldiers, and brothers John and Arch Nesbitt joined the U.S. Colored Troops to fight for their freedom. John Nesbitt enlisted on October 5, 1863, as a private in Company H, 4th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery Regiment, served in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas, and was discharged on February 25, 1866. Arch Nesbitt enlisted on August 24, 1864, in Company G, 12th U.S. Colored Infantry, fought in the Battle of Nashville in December, and then served guarding the Nashville and Northwestern Railroad through the southern end of Dickson County and across the Tennessee River at Johnsonville before his honorable discharge on January 16, 1866. After the war, the brothers joined other newly freed black men, women, and children in the community known as Promise Land near the farms where they had once been enslaved. Suffering from service-related injuries, John Nesbitt spent years seeking disability compensation from the War Department, received a retroactive pension in 1880, and used part of it to buy the land here, including the site where Promise Land School was built early in the 1880s. The community supported the school until 1899, when John and Ellen Clemmons Nesbitt deeded it to the Dickson County school system, and it remained a public elementary school until it closed in May 1956.