African American Education in Belton

The school began about 1882 in the Black community of Dangerfield, in a frame building on the west bank of Nolan Creek. Fire destroyed it three times before the brick building of 1936. Frame buildings for vocational classes and hot lunches followed, then a south wing in the 1950s and a gym in 1962. Former students recall a family feel, secondhand books from the white school, and stadium use only when the white team was away. In September 1966 the board closed Harris as an all-Black elementary school, with 70 Black and five Mexican children enrolled.

What the plaque says

African American Education in Belton Bell County school districts were formed in 1854. The earliest record of public education for area African American students dates from 1882 when Mrs. Aleck McGee was hired "to teach the colored school." Professor Thomas Breckenridge Harris (1862-1907), a graduate of Fisk University, became the first instructor of the African American High School in 1890. The name "West Belton School" was chosen in 1900. In 1936 a new building was erected on this site to house African American students of all grade levels. By petition the school was named "T. W. Harris" for its revered former principal. The last class graduated in 1966; Belton schools were integrated the following year. (1998)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 7.6 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Mother Neff State Park — 19 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• Belton Woman's Commonwealth — 0.2 mi
• William Whitaker Reed — 0.3 mi
• Scott and White School of Nursing — 0.4 mi
• Bell County Courthouses — 0.4 mi