Abbeville Colored School

The county supervisors put up $4,000 for a Black school and the local community matched it, and the Gordon family gave the land. The school opened in January 1950 with four classrooms for grades one through eight, without running water or indoor bathrooms. A high school building followed, then a 1960 building for the lower grades. After integration the buildings stood abandoned for nearly forty years. A fund drive began in 2009, the Gordon Community and Cultural Center opened in 2014, and the site became a Mississippi Landmark in 2020. A donor-funded marker followed in 2022.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Oxford Square — 7.4 mi
  The courthouse square laid out in 1837 on land bought from a Chickasaw woman, rebuilt after the 1864 burning and home to Square Books and a memorial to Lafayette County's lynching victims.
• The Lyceum and the Circle, University of Mississippi — 7.6 mi
  The 1848 Greek Revival building at the center of the Ole Miss campus, where federal marshals held off a mob on 30 September 1962 and James Meredith registered the next morning.
• Rowan Oak — 7.9 mi
  William Faulkner's Greek Revival house in Oxford, bought in 1930 and kept by the University of Mississippi, with the outline of A Fable still written on his study wall.
• Sardis Lake and Dam — 17 mi
  A flood-control lake on the Little Tallahatchie, built from 1930s labor and a dredge named Pontotoc, with a dam that for years was the largest earth-filled dam in the world.

More markers nearby

• Tallahatchie River Defense Line — 4.6 mi
• College Church — 4.9 mi
• Cedar Oaks — 6.7 mi
• L.Q.C. Lamar House — 7.1 mi