On a snowy December day, Terry and Gwen Shavers are putting the final touches on a small home in Braceville, cleaning up the kitchen and arranging black and white photos along the home’s bright yellow walls.
These are more than just family snapshots. They chronicle more than a century of small town history in the community, just west of Warren. Terry grabbed a frame of a woman standing in this same neighborhood, captured more than 50 years ago.
“These lots are only 40-foot wide,” Shavers said, pointing to the photograph. “This is one street and there's houses all the way down the street. We know them all.”
The photo is one of many artifacts that are housed in the new Braceville African American Heritage Museum. There’s exhibits on local athletes, authors, entrepreneurs and veterans: all to celebrate the small town’s rich Black history.
“We actually think that at one point in time, this was the largest rural African-American community in Ohio,” Terry said.
The best of Braceville
The museum space is the former childhood home of Terry’s relative, Earnie Shavers, a heavyweight boxer best known for his hard-hitting punch. He grew up to become a champion fighter, brave enough to step in the ring with the legendary Muhammad Ali.
His sister, Grace Dean, is proud of Earnie’s performance at the 1977 fight against Ali at Madison Square Gardens. Although Shavers didn’t win, she said he put up “one heck of a fight.”
A wall of the museum documents Earnie’s accomplishments. Just beside it, baseball jerseys of an assortment of colors hang. They were all once worn by switch hitter Ted Toles Jr., a Negro League Baseball Hall of Famer from Braceville and Gwen’s uncle.
“He played with Jackie Robinson [and] Larry Doby,” Gwen recalled. “And he made such a fantastic catch that they hoisted him on his shoulders and carried him off the field. And that was one of the highlights of his life.”
Toles Jr. passed away in 2016. But his son Ted Toles III still lives in Braceville and is helping to build the exhibit about his father. Toles said his dad wanted his story to be a model for young people in the community.
“He would always tell them if he can come from a small town and make it to the big leagues, they could do it, too,” Toles said.
A small town sanctuary
Toles believes it’s not a coincidence that so many high-achievers came out of Braceville’s Black community. He said it can be traced back to before the town was even officially formed.
“Coming from the South, [they had] to have a certain demeanor, a willingness to survive,” Toles said.
During the so-called Great Migration, Black people moved from the South in search of a better life. Many found one in Braceville. It had served as a stop on the Underground Railroad and, later, in the ‘20s, it boasted jobs at a nearby steel plant.
The Black community lived in a neighborhood separated from white residents, confined to less than a square mile of swampy land. But Terry Shavers said that small piece of land was enough for them to thrive and grow into a community of 400 people.
“They had total freedom to do what they wanted, the police didn’t bother them,” Terry said. “As a matter of fact, we had our own constable [and] hardly ever needed to call him.”
An oft-ignored history
These small pockets of independent rural Black communities, like Braceville, sprouted up across the state after the Great Migration. But their histories aren’t often very well-documented, said Ric Sheffield, a Kenyon College sociologist who studies Black rural life and author of “We Got By: A Black Family’s Journey in the Heartland.”
“Black people have lived throughout rural America from the very earliest times,” Sheffield said. “And yet, the perception is that we haven't, we don't, and ‘What in the world are we doing there?’”
Sheffield said the experiences of Black Ohioans in small towns are often ignored when putting together a social studies syllabus or choosing what to put in the local history museum. In his hometown of Mount Vernon, he said he rarely heard about the accomplishments of people of color.
“Young people of color living in predominantly white rural communities don't often see people who look like them. [They] almost never hear anyone say that people who do look like them were important or contributed in any meaningful way,” Sheffield said.
Preserving the past
The Shavers are determined to make sure that doesn’t happen in Braceville. Gwen Shavers wants young people to know the story of community members like Earnie Shavers and Ted Toles Jr., whose accomplishments deserve to be remembered.
“From this little tiny community a lot of notable people came,” Gwen said. “We said ‘If we don't tell it, no one else will. It will be lost.’”
The Shavers also recorded more than 30 hours of interviews with locals. Their stories will live in a digital exhibit at the museum and in a historical documentary about Braceville titled “History Forgotten and Now for All to See”.
And, the couple isn’t done collecting. They’ve left space in the museum for the future accomplishments of the resilient, tight-knit and hardworking people that make up the community.
“It’s just something to share with other people about African American people who all came to a little community and caused it to be a thriving place to live in, that people loved,” Gwen said.
This project was made possible by the America 250 Ohio Commission.
