In observance of Juneteenth, Park City Prep will be closed on Friday, June 19, 2026.
Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers brought the news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas — two years after the Confederacy had surrendered. That was also about 2½ years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the Southern states.
While Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 to free enslaved people in Confederate states, it was June 1865 that many Black people still held in bondage in Texas were told that the order had freed them.
The isolation of Texas from the rest of the country and remote landscape kept Union soldiers from enforcing the message as quickly there as they had been able to elsewhere.