Rapp Road Community Historic District
Near Albany, New York
In the western suburbs of Albany, a small neighborhood on Rapp Road tells the story of one of New York's most unusual Great Migration communities. Starting in the nineteen twenties, a congregation of Black families from Shubuta, Mississippi, followed their pastor, Louis Parson, north to Albany, bought land here in the pine barrens, and built their own homes by hand. By the nineteen fifties the community numbered more than twenty families, all tied to the same church, all from the same Mississippi county, living on land they owned outright.
The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand two as a rare intact example of a self-built, self-sufficient African American enclave created through chain migration. The church Parson founded remains at the center of the neighborhood.
