The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 forced many Creoles to leave Louisiana, and they settled the Frenchtown area. When new residents no longer moved to Frenchtown, the neighborhood culturally merged with the greater Fifth Ward. Culture Lisa Gray, a journalist for the Houston Press, stated in a 2000 article that the Fifth Ward has an overall sense of history and a "small-scale, deep-rooted personal history, the way that, in the middle of the city, lives are intertwined in a small-town way." Many families from the area had lived in the Fifth Ward for several generations. In previous eras, African-Americans of all social classes lived in the Fifth Ward; African-American professionals patronized businesses. After the end of segregation, African-American professionals began to patronize other neighborhoods, and members of the African-American middle class moved out of the Fifth Ward. The north-south Southern Pacific Transportation Company railroad tracks separate the Fifth Ward from Denver Harbor. David Benson, an assistant to Harris County Commissioner El Franco Lee, described the railroad line as "a semi-permeable membrane." In the 1990s many Fifth Ward African-Americans went into Denver Harbor to shop at the area supermarket and stores, while the Denver Harbor Hispanics rarely entered the Fifth Ward. Richard West of the Texas Monthly wrote in 1979 that within the Fifth Ward one's personal status "is determined less by what you have than by personal qualities of wit and style and by what you know of the power structure of the street". Religion Mount Vernon United Methodist Church, founded in 1865, is the community's oldest church, and the Fifth Ward has six churches that, as of 2011, are over 100 years old. Kate Shellnutt of the Houston Chronicle said that the historic church facilities "have been community strongholds." In 1979 the largest church in the Fifth Ward was the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, with 5,600 members. The Our Mother of Mercy Catholic Church, completed in 1930 by Creoles for Creoles, serves as a social center for the Frenchtown neighborhood. Education Primary and secondary schools Public schools Area students attend schools in the Houston Independent School District. even though most of the Fifth Ward and the adjacent Denver Harbor neighborhood are zoned to the same high school, the areas are represented by different board members. Elementary schools in the Fifth Ward and serving sections of the Fifth Ward include Charles H. Atherton, Blanche Kelso Bruce, Dogan, and Nathaniel Q.