Colored Christian Church and Colored School

This congregation has outlasted nearly everything around it. Langston's first classes met in the church basement in 1892 before the school moved to Myrtle and Elm Streets. The wooden building was bricked over by 1955, and members have met on Thanksgiving morning since then. A fire in the early 1970s damaged the sanctuary, and Milligan College, Emmanuel School of Religion and neighbors helped pay for repairs. The basement kitchen later fed a Saturday meals program called Loaves and Fishes. Today the congregation is small, about thirty members.

What the plaque says

Colored Christian Church and Colored School This 1889 structure, originally "the Colored Christian Church," now West Main Street Christian Church, was also Johnson City's second school building (1889-1891) for "Colored" children. It is the oldest church building and school building still standing in the city. Dr. Hezekiah B. Hankal, who founded the church ca. 1869, was a leader in establishing the city's earliest African-American schools. William Wolfe was principal (1888-1907) of the school in four different locations.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park — 6.1 mi
  A shoal on the Watauga River where the Transylvania Company bought about 20 million acres from the Cherokee in March 1775, Dragging Canoe refused, and the Overmountain Men mustered in 1780.
• Rocky Mount Museum — 6.3 mi
  William Cobb's log house at Piney Flats, where Governor William Blount ran the Southwest Territory from 1790 to 1792, now a living-history museum set in 1791 with a reconstructed cabin for the enslaved.
• Jonesborough Historic District — 6.4 mi
  Tennessee's oldest town, chartered in 1779, where Elihu Embree printed The Emancipator in 1820 and a hay wagon by the courthouse started the National Storytelling Festival in 1973.
• Unicoi County Heritage Museum and the Erwin Rail Yard — 11 mi
  A museum in the old fish hatchery superintendent's house in Erwin, a Clinchfield railroad town where the elephant Mary was hanged in 1916 and Black residents were driven out in 1918.

More markers nearby

• Dr. Hezekiah B. Hankal — steps away
• State Flag — steps away
• Johnson City Incorporated December 1, 1869 — 0.3 mi
• East Tennessee & Western North Carolina (ET & WNC) Depot — 0.3 mi