Beverly Ann Bardequez was fiercely proud of the place where she was born and where she lived her final years — fighting to protect her community for future generations.

She died on July 22 at the age of 73 and was mourned yesterday at the church in Albany, Wilborn’s Temple Church of God in Christ, that for decades has been central to her community.

She was born on Rapp Road on April 13, 1949, soon after her grandparents built their house there. The Rapp Road community, located partly in the town of Guilderland and partly in the panhandle of Albany, was carved out of the pine bush in the 1930s by African-American sharecroppers who came north during the Great Migration.

In a 2017 Enterprise podcast, Ms. Bardequez shared her earliest memories of growing up on Rapp Road. On a gray day, speaking in a house she had lovingly restored, she told stories filled with the magic of childhood.

Her parents rented a little home down Pine Lane, just off Rapp Road, from a farmer named Mr. Salisbury. She remembered how the farmer would let her and her brother hitch rides on the back of his horse-pulled hay wagon.

She also recalled a snowy winter day when she was 4. “My mom had me get up and look out our front porch and there was a beautiful silver sleigh leaning up against the doorway,” she said. “Mr. Salisbury had refurbished an old sled and left it by the door for us. And I can remember my mom pulling my little brother and I on the sled up the road, up Rapp Road to my grandmother’s house, who happens to live right next door to me now.”

She also remembered how her mother, her grandmother, and her aunts were “always doing projects.” One of the projects was making a manger scene in the front yard at Christmastime. “I can still smell the scent of the pine boughs they used to make the roof of the manger,” she said.

Of her early life in the Rapp Road neighborhood, Ms. Bardequez said, “It was just such a wonderful, warm feeling, being with my family … and it didn’t occur to me just how industrious they were as women at the time. But, as I got older, it started to occur to me, they will tackle anything, they will build anything, and they've passed that down.”

Her grandmother, she said, built a shotgun house on their pine bush land from scraps, with newspaper for insulation, until a proper, larger house could be built.

While Ms. Bardequez said she herself was “not a manual person,” her daughters are builders. “They will tackle anything,” she said.

What Ms. Bardequez built — one lecture at a time, educating people about her community; one meeting at a time, explaining to planning boards why developers shouldn’t be allowed to obliterate her neighborhood — was pride in the Rapp Road community.

She described how Reverend Louis Parson had come to Albany in the 1930s by way of Cleveland, Ohio, from Shubuta, Mississippi. He had worked on the railroad in Mississippi, she said, and, after being injured on the job, was awarded a sum of money.

“He felt it wasn’t a good idea for a Black man in the South at that time, to have a lot of money,” she said.

Rev. Parson started a storefront church in Albany’s South End. Decades later, in the 1950s, his congregation moved to an historic Jewish synagogue on Jay street.

“He wanted to grow his flock,” Ms. Bardequez said, so Rev. Parson started recruiting family members and friends from Shubuta.

Black children couldn’t get a decent education there and the tenant farmers and sharecroppers could never get ahead because of a rigged system, she said. But, she went on, “It wasn’t easy to get to Albany.”

Rev. Parson would drive his seven-passenger Buick to Shubuta, arriving on a Saturday night to pick up families. They worshiped all day on Sunday so wouldn’t be missed till Monday morning, she explained.

“They basically had to come with nothing more than the clothes on their backs … By the time Monday morning rolled around, they would be well above the Mason-Dixon line, headed north.”

They settled in Albany’s South End but the bars, prostitution, and gambling “wasn’t a good fit for a faith-based community” said Ms. Bardequez.

Also, the newcomers missed country living. “I remember my mom saying, when she came to Albany, the question she asked her mom was: Where’s the house we’re going to live in? … She was used to a house with plenty of space around it,” not a city rowhouse.

Years later, when Ms. Bardequez visited Shubuta herself, she was amazed by how much it looked like Rapp Road.

Some of the flock got discouraged. “My great-grandfather was one of the people that decided this was not for him, and he went back south,” said Ms. Bardequez.

Rev. Parson and William Toliver pooled their resources to buy 14 acres in the pine bush. “This was nothing but pine trees and sand,” said Ms. Bardequez. The land was parceled out to church members, including her grandmother and grandfather.

There were no mortgages to be had so the church members paid what they could over time. Being farmers, they knew how to clear the land. “There were gardens all up and down the road,” said Ms. Bardequez.

She remembered getting into trouble for repeatedly running into her uncle’s garden to take cucumbers and watermelons. “He would chase us …. It was almost a game with us.”

The neighborhood was home to cows and pigs as well as hens. Ms. Bardequez was tasked by her grandmother with getting eggs from the hen house. “I loved nothing more than feeling the warm eggs with the chicken feathers still on them,” she said.

She also remembered her grandmother taking a hen from the hen house to the chopping block for Sunday dinner. “She’d wring its neck and chop the head off and the chicken would still be running around — and it freaked me out,” she said.

During the Great Depression, some women would leave the community to do domestic work to make money while others stayed behind to mind the children. “The men would get whatever work they could.”

Ms. Bardequez stressed, “It was their determination to survive and to work together that helped this community stay intact all these years.”

She went on, “Every house on this road was built by hand by the owners, and each one had some strength that they could lend to help.” Her grandfather and uncles, for instance, dug cellars by hand to lay cinder-block foundations. “There were no mortgages, no loans to be had,” she said.

The children were to go to school in Albany, Ms. Bardequez said, but the district would not provide transportation. Her grandmother and others took turns bringing the kids to school and bringing them back home again.

Finally, the church put together the resources to buy a bus. “My grandmother drove the school bus, so she was the first Black woman to drive a bus in Albany.”

Rapp Road at the time was more like a wagon trail, Ms. Bardequez said, so her uncle and some of the other men opened the road so the school bus could turn around to get back out onto Western Avenue.

The year 1971 was a turning point for the community because Washington Avenue Extension was built. “That opened it up for development,” said Ms. Bardequez. “No one knew we were here until Washington Avenue Extension came about, and when people started coming through here, they were in shock and they would just look. Because you see all these Black people up and down this road and you’re trying to figure out: Where did they come from?”

The neighborhood is now pressed by development on all sides.

The community formed a charter in 2006 to organize as a not-for-profit, the Rapp Road Historic Association, “so that we can try to preserve and keep what remains of this neighborhood intact,” Ms. Bardequez said.

Her aunt, the late Emma Dickson, was a community leader who helped Jennifer Lemak, a graduate student, research the history of the community, which Lemak later published as a book, “Southern Life, Northern City: The History of Albany’s Rapp Road Community.”

“The folks in this community were older and very guarded so you just don’t knock on the door and say, ‘Would you mind if I interviewed you?’ Emma had to convince them and prep them … Emma was determined to get the history of how we got here and who we were documented somehow.

“So it was a perfect match. Jennifer was able to do her research project. Emma was able to get her history documented because there were all kinds of rumors …. She wanted the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So she and Jennifer teamed up and they became the dynamic duo that put this history on paper.”

The Rapp Road community was recognized as a New York State Historic District on the National and Historic Registry in 2002 based on Emma Dickson and Jennifer Lemak’s work.

Ms. Bardequez followed in her aunt’s footsteps becoming president of the Rapp Road Historical Association.

She said what sustained the community through the near-century of its existence was its members’ faith in God and sense of community. “They believed that there was nothing they couldn’t do if they believed and they had faith,” she said.

“They did that by worshiping and praying and doing whatever they could to help each other … That sense of community was so strong here. It didn’t matter whose child you were, from one end of the road to the other, you were treated like you belong.”

Ms. Bardequez was her family’s third generation to live in the Rapp Road community and her fondest hope was that its tradition would carry on to future generations.

“Like Elder Louis Parson, I believe God brought me here because he knew that, in order for us to keep what was formed here, what was born here, someone had to pick up the mantle,” she said. “And I’m hoping to pass it on to the next generation.”

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Beverly Ann Bardequez is survived by her three beloved daughters, Dina Ranellucci and Tracy of Petersburg, New York; Erinn Serriano Harkless and Floyd of Berne, and Nora Serriano of Albany; and her son, Seth Poland, and Nina of Pico Rivera, California; and two daughters of affection, Joy Winans and Mario and Kathleen McClean and Mark.

She had seven cherished grandchildren: Kealand Mckinnon and Hallie; Jalesa Harkless; Luccas Serriano; Gabriella Ranellucci; Tessa Ranellucci; Lexxus Serriano-Pearson; Xavier Martin, and nine great-grandchildren.

She is also survived by nine siblings: Edward Ferguson Jr. and Sandy; Lyle Ferguson; Mary DeWitt, whose husband, Ward, is deceased; Mark Ferguson; Lois Morris and Euton; Kirk Ferguson; Johnathan McClement and Jill; Marian Gocaand, and two sisters of affection: Clarice Milliken and Theresa Walker.

Her son, Vincent Anthony Serriano, died before her, as did her parents, Edward and Girlie Ferguson, and her brother Kevin Ferguson.

She also had many beloved nieces, nephews, cousins, godchildren, and three aunts: Pauline Walker, Dorothy Woodard, and Emma Dickson.

Funeral services were held on Wednesday, July 13, at Wilborn’s Temple Church of God in Christ at 121 Jay St. in Albany.