SPRINGFIELD, Mo. – The first homes were holes in the ground.
Emma Ray remembered them clearly — dugouts scraped into the earth after emancipation, brush houses stitched together with whatever could be found. Freedom had arrived, but shelter had not. Families sang and prayed anyway.
Springfield counted Black life early. In the 1836 Missouri state census — taken just three years after Greene County was formed — Greene County listed 3,841 people: 3,266 white and 575 Black, enumerated under “free persons of color” and “slaves.”…