This project begins with a simple question: how can we recover the history of Black landownership, Black-owned businesses, and displacement along Castle Street in a way that is careful, useful, and community-centered? The work completed so far suggests that Castle Street can be studied not only as a row of modern parcels, but as a historic Black home-and-business corridor shaped by ownership, labor, family ties, and later loss. At this stage, however, the material should be understood as preliminary and subject to confirmation through continued review by researchers and historians.

The preliminary research to this point has focused especially on the 500 through 1200 blocks and has established a practical method for tracing ownership and change over time. One key finding is that modern parcel tools are helpful for identifying current boundaries, parcel numbers, deed references, and sales history, but they do not on their own reveal 19th-century ownership. To move backward in time, the project connects present-day parcels to earlier properties through Sanborn fire maps, tax maps, city directories, deed chains, and census records. These early findings provide a working foundation, but they still need to be checked, expanded, and confirmed through further historical review.

This combined method has also made it possible to rebuild a parcel-by-parcel framework for documenting each property’s address history, ownership timeline, business use, transfer records, and signs of unequal or forced loss. In that process, several patterns have emerged as especially important to watch for, including tax foreclosures, partition sales, rapid resale, clustered transfers after 1898, repeated purchases by the same buyer, and later urban renewal acquisition. For the 500 block in particular, the work has already produced a preliminary roster of names, occupations, and community roles tied to specific addresses. Examples include Henry Nixon, identified as a carpenter or house builder; Mary Nixon, listed as a seamstress; Sarah Foy, listed as a midwife; and William Bryant, listed as a barber. These examples help illustrate the kinds of home, labor, and business activity that appear to have shaped the corridor, while also underscoring the need for continued confirmation by researchers and historians.

Together, these findings provide the foundation for the larger work ahead. They offer a way to organize future block-by-block research while also supporting community history, descendant outreach, preservation planning, and public interpretation as additional deeds, directories, and census records are verified

The Collective hopes to work with community groups, churches, non-profits, to realize the history as well as oral history research with families. The preliminary research will hopefully lead to grants to put this work into fruition.

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