The Ransom and Sarah Williams family lived in a rural community along Bear Creek in the late nineteenth century, but almost all of their neighbors were white. Because of the realities of racial segregation, their social lives were tied to the nearby African American communities. This map depicts some of the communities that existed in southern Travis and northern Hays Counties in the 1870s and 1880s. Prior to emancipation, Ransom Williams was probably enslaved on the John Wheeler Bunton plantation in the Mountain City area, southwest of present-day Buda. After emancipation, the Williams family had connections to Antioch Colony, where many of the former Bunton slaves settled. By 1877, the Rose Colony school had been built and a freedmen's community was emerging there, much closer to the Williams Farmstead than Antioch Colony. Once the railroad came in 1880, the community of Manchaca sprang up, and Rose Colony became an African American neighborhood within the town. Base map is the USGS 1896 Austin Quadrangle map at 125,000:1 scale.