Balaam Allen was born enslaved, but years after the Emancipation Proclamation brought freedom, he found himself —along with two other Black freedmen and their wives — settling along the muggy banks of Brevard’s Crane Creek in the mosquito-laden Florida wildlands.
This Juneteenth, nearly 132 years after Allen died at the age of 45, a group of Melbourne residents will gather at Line Street Cemetery to pay homage to Allen as one of the city’s founders, with a new headstone at what stood for decades as an overgrown, unmarked grave.
“We have two things happening: the headstone dedication and the recognition and significance of Juneteenth,” said Teri Jones, organizer of the Juneteenth celebration set for 10:30 a.m. June 19 at Greater Allen Chapel AME Church in Melbourne.
The storied history of Melbourne’s founding will also be celebrated with a free Juneteenth breakfast program for those who register. Other celebrations will take place nationally on Thursday, while some will stretch into the holiday weekend.
Organizers will open the Greater Allen Chapel Museum at Crane Creek for free tours to the general public, including students who will be out of school for the holiday, Jones said.
Three men seek to capitalize on their freedom
Juneteenth, a federal holiday, is held June 19 to commemorate freedom — different from Independence Day, which honors America’s founding — and the nation’s ending of enslavement of Blacks in1865 after remnants of the Confederacy fell across the South.
The holiday’s name — a portmanteau of “June” and “Nineteenth” — stems from the fact that some of the enslaved in Texas were not told by plantation owners about the end of slavery until mid-June, nearly two months after President Lincoln’s assassination and the end of the Civil War. In Florida, the Emancipation Day is celebrated annually on May 20, when a Union general stood in Tallahassee a month after Lincoln’s death and declared freedom for all in bondage.
It was sometime in the late 1860s to 1870s that Allen, along with Peter Wright and Wright Brothers, sought to capitalize on their freedom by settling along the untamed, palm tree-lined brush along Crane Creek. The families, given the chance at self-determination, braced the Florida heat, mosquitos and storms along with other challenges to make the land a place for rebirth, historians point out. It was also in the home of Wright and Mary Brothers that Allen and his wife, Salina, and the Lipscomb family began organizing a religious fellowship that would later become Allen Chapel A.M.E. Church, records show.
“These were all young men who were free. And they came here with their wives,” Jones said.
Brothers would go on to start a grocery store, while Allen harvested citrus on his land. Wright would take on work as a mail carrier who rode the Indian River to deliver mail along several routes all the way to Titusville.
Allen died of rheumatism in 1893 after years of suffering and buried without a headstone in a cemetery located a short walk from the church grounds, records show. Over the decades, the area had become overgrown with palmettos and the markers faded until a group of Brevard Boy Scouts uncovered the location some five decades ago.
Jones said that while the graveside dedication might be a different type of occasion for the national holiday, known for its barbecues, music and other celebrations, the event will make for a special commemoration in line with the message of the day.
Allen and the others took their freedom and built a community, laying the foundation for what would become the city of Melbourne, she pointed out.
The event is one of several taking place for Juneteenth along the Space Coast.
In Mims, the Harry T. & Harriette V. Moore Cultural Complex will host a free Juneteenth Celebration festival from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. June 21, with music, food, free books and games. There will also be tours of the refurbished home of the Moores, where a bomb blast killed the civil rights advocates on Christmas Day 1951.
For information on Juneteenth events at Greater Allen Chapel AME Church in Melbourne, contact teri@metcainc.org.
J.D. Gallop is a criminal justice/breaking news reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Gallop at 321-917-4641 or jgallop@floridatoday.com. X, formerly known as Twitter: @JDGallop.
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Juneteenth ceremony to honor a Melbourne founder with new headstone and a story of freedom
Reporting by J.D. Gallop, Florida Today / Florida Today
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