Barefield School

In September 1934 the Refugio paper tallied the opening of school: 546 in the public elementary grades, 95 in high school, and 117 reported by Principal A. T. Barefield of what the paper called the Negro school. Those three numbers add to the 758 printed as the total. The Rosenwald Fund's card for the county's school, dated 1928-29 and listing three acres, gives a cost of $7,050: $4,800 in public money, $1,500 from Black residents and $750 from the fund. Black families helped pay for the school that segregation required them to use.

What the plaque says

Barefield School African Americans were denied access to education while enslaved, but opportunities emerged after emancipation. The first African American school in Refugio was held in a shotgun building on the corner of Santiago and Osage Streets. The school, known as the Refugio Colored School, later moved to the corner of Alamo and King Streets. The school had no running water so the boys carried water from Osage Street for drinking purposes. The students also found and cut firewood during the winter months to heat the school and were responsible for maintenance of the building. In 1927, the school burned. Professor A.T. Barefield arranged for classes to be held at the Bob Button Dance Hall and then at Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church. Beginning in 1917, Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears Roebuck Company, began to provide matching funds for African American schools in the south. By 1929, a new two-room stucco building was erected on East Commons Street through the Rosenwald school building program. The school was later named Barefield School after professor A.T. Barefield, an educator in Refugio from 1902 to 1949, who promoted education and good citizenship within the black community. As attendance grew, the board of trustees approved to move one of the two-room buildings from the white school to the Negro school grounds. The Rosenwald School no longer exists but the 1933 addition still stands at commons and bayou streets. The Barefield School was the only Rosenwald School in Refugio County and was a symbol of vision and progress for the community during the early 1900s. (2013)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Goose Island State Park — 21 mi
  A bayside park between St. Charles and Aransas bays, home of the Big Tree, the state champion coastal live oak, thought to be more than a thousand years old.
• Fulton Mansion State Historic Site — 22 mi
  A French Second Empire house of 1874-77 on Aransas Bay, paid for with hides and tallow, with gas lights, central heat and hot running water no other house nearby had.
• Fannin Memorial Monument — 25 mi
  The 1938 pink granite memorial over the common grave of Fannin's men, shot on the roads out of Goliad on Palm Sunday 1836, the grave itself found again only in the 1930s.
• Zaragoza Birthplace State Historic Site — 25 mi
  A rebuilt stone house beside La Bahía marking where Ignacio Seguín Zaragoza, the general of the Battle of Puebla and Cinco de Mayo, was born in 1829.

More markers nearby

• Home County of Texas Confederate Colonel A.M. Hobby — 0.6 mi
• Site of the Home of Captain Ira Westover — 0.6 mi
• Irish Immigrants in Refugio — 0.7 mi
• Sally Scull — 0.7 mi