Preserving Southside: College Station's Oldest Neighborhood Races to Save Its Stories

In this episode of “Brazos Matters,” host Jay Socol and student contributor Meredith Carrasco explore what happens when a historic neighborhood faces disappearing before its stories are documented. Their guests are Barbara Moore, University and Community Relations Manager for the City of College Station, and Liana Vincent, a longtime resident of College Station's Southside neighborhood — the area across George Bush Drive from campus that turned 100 years old in 2023.

Vincent references the generations of families — the Lancasters, Glovers, Wests, Schaefers, and others — who've lived in Southside since the 1920s. She describes organizing a centennial celebration, collecting 25-30 oral histories now being archived in the city's Project HOLD database, and her hope to eventually turn those stories into a published booklet.

Moore explains the city's role in supporting preservation, from conservation overlays and code enforcement to parallel oral-history efforts in the McCullough and Eastgate neighborhoods — two of College Station's historically Black communities. The conversation closes with practical advice for the students who increasingly call Southside home: get involved, be considerate neighbors, and help carry the neighborhood's history forward even as development continues to reshape it.

Brazos Matters is a production of Aggieland’s Public Media, KAMU-TV and KAMU-FM, a member of Texas A&M University's Division of Community Engagement.