Education

Education. African Americans in Montgomery County. Recently emancipated African Americans yearned for education after the Civil War. They worked to build schools and educate themselves, often with assistance from the Freedmen's Bureau., Freedmen's Bureau agent, Captain Charles Schaeffer, helped build Christiansburg School No. 1, the first school for African Americans in Montgomery County. Here, two teachers taught 232 students in a room rented in the cabin of free woman of color Nancy Campbell. The school grew through the work of community members and a northern Quaker group called the Friends' Freedmen's Association after the 1871 disbandment of the Freedmen's Bureau., Booker T. Washington served as supervisor of the school, then known as Christiansburg Industrial Institute, from 1895-1915. The high school level curriculum was modeled after Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes and gave generations of African American students from Montgomery County and beyond an opportunity for higher education., Schools for African Americans opened in Blacksburg, Alleghany Springs, Brush Creek (Pilot), Wake Forest, and Lovely Mount (Radford) between 1868 and 1870. By 1940, there was a one-room school at Piney Woods near the community of Childress; two-room schools at Blacksburg, Wake Forest, Elliston, and Shawsville; and a multi-room elementary school known as Hill School in Christiansburg. Four of these schools were built using grants from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a fund established in 1917 to build schools for African Americans in the rural South with the guidance and resources of Booker T Washington and the Tuskegee Institute. Together the Rosenwald Fund, the local African American population, and the county school board built the new buildings at Piney Woods, Shawsville, Wake Forest, and Elliston in the early twentieth century., Captions , . (top left) Lou Ella McNorton's class at the Hill School, c. 1910 , . (top right) Elliston School in 1950, partially funded with Rosenwald money , . (bottom left) Principal Charles Marshall working with students in the Print Shop at Christiansburg Industrial Institute, c. 1900 , . (bottom right) Children playing outside the Elliston school, 1950