Black Education in Bryan

The plaque gives the school's opening. A history prepared in the 1970s gives its daily shape. The school began with grades one through ten, taught Latin in grades seven through eleven, and reached twelve grades in 1940 to 1941. After the 1914 fire, classes met in Allen Chapel A.M.E., Lee Chapel Methodist and Shiloh Baptist churches until a brick building opened in 1915. Lenora Green, one of the first teachers, was a Fisk graduate. In 1952 the school district bought the last three lots from the Negro Woman's Club.

What the plaque says

Black Education in Bryan On March 30, 1885, the City of Bryan purchased seven lots in this area as a site for a public school to provide separate but equal and impartial instruction for black children of the community, as prescribed by the Texas State Constitution of 1876. The "Bryan Public School for Colored" was the first educational institution established for blacks in Brazos County. When school opened in the fall of 1885, its principal was A.H. Colwell, who later became a prominent leader of black Republicans, and was named as a presidential elector from Texas in 1896. The original faculty included Mrs. Anne Alberson, Misses Mamie Burrows and Beatrice Calhoun, Mrs. Ada Scott Hall, and Mrs. Lenora Green, a classmate of Dr. William E.B. Dubois. The first school building of this site was a two-story frame structure, furnished with planks supported by kegs for seating. After the school burned in 1914, a brick edifice was constructed. In 1930, when the Kemp Junior-Senior High School was built across town, this facility became Washington Elementary School. After its destruction by fire in Sept. 1971, Washington Elementary was not rebuilt and the black students were integrated into the Bryan Public School System. Washington Park occupies most of the original site. (1975)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum — 5.8 mi
  The library of the forty-first president on the Texas A&M campus, opened in 1997, where George and Barbara Bush and their daughter Robin are buried in a family plot on the grounds.
• Navasota — 26 mi
  A railroad and cotton town where the La Bahia Road crossed the Navasota River, scarred by an 1865 explosion and yellow fever, and the home ground of the songster Mance Lipscomb.
• Fanthorp Inn State Historic Site — 27 mi
  A cedar-log dogtrot cabin of 1834 on the road through Anderson that grew into a seventeen-room inn and post office for travelers of the Republic, kept by one family until 1976.
• Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site — 27 mi
  The townsite on the Brazos where delegates met in a cold, unfinished hall in March 1836 to declare Texas independent, with Independence Hall rebuilt and Anson Jones's Barrington farm worked as in 1850.

More markers nearby

• Allen Chapel A. M. E. Church — steps away
• Bryan City Cemetery — 0.3 mi
• Confederate Veterans in Bryan City Cemetery — 0.3 mi
• Site of Odd Fellows University and Orphans Home — 0.3 mi