User:GGB TX/sandbox

= Anderson Bonner =

Was known as a prominent landowner and businessman. Anderson Bonner was born enslaved in Alabama around the year 1939. His early years are lost to history as no one remains alive with this knowledge. Members of his family recall stories of Bonner being given as a wedding present to the daughter of his former slave owner, who moved him from Alabama to Arkansas. Bonner may have been “refugeed in Texas during the Civil War when nearly 100,000 enslaved people from neighboring states were forcibly brought there by slaveholders to avoid the Union Army freeing them as it gradually occupied more of the Confederacy. If Bonner was in Texas by 1865, he like other Lone Star state enslaved people—gained his freedom when Union General Gordon Granger and Union Troops under his command arrived in Galveston on June 19, 1865 (Juneteenth ) and pronounced the end of slavery.