Gregory School

The school's namesake held his Texas post for about seven months. Edgar M. Gregory, a Philadelphia lumber merchant, was commissioned colonel of the Ninety-first Pennsylvania in 1861 and ended the war a brevet brigadier general. In September 1865 he took charge of the Freedmen's Bureau in Texas at the Galveston customhouse, named twenty-one local agents and ordered that a freedman's labor contract be a lien on the crop. David G. Burnet accused him of turning freedmen against their employers, and he was removed in April 1866. Gregory gave the Institute its land and died in 1871.

What the plaque says

Gregory School In 1865, as the reality of Emancipation spread across Texas, many formerly enslaved African Americans left plantations and other places of bondage in search of a better life. Some established "Freedmen's Town" near Buffalo Bayou in Houston's Fourth Ward. The Freedmen's Bureau and the American Missionary Association worked with the Black community to establish schools in three early churches. Adults and children were taught in the same classes by White teachers. Houston's first purpose-built school for Blacks was the 1870 Gregory Institute, named for E.M. Gregory, a Freedmen's Bureau official. Black trustees Richard Allen, Rev. Elias Dibble, Peter Noble, Rev. Sandy Parker and William Waff raised money for the private school, located in a two-story brick building on Jefferson Avenue at Louisiana Street. In 1876, it became part of Houston's public school system, with Black teachers. In 1877, Henry C. Hardy became the school's first Black principal. The school relocated to this site in a new wooden building in 1903. Overcrowding, neglect, and fire damage led to the 1926 construction of this two-story, 20,000-square-foot brick building, renamed the Gregory School. The new facility continued educating Black students to prosper within a segregated society. The Houston ISD officially closed the school in 1980, citing low enrollment and a deteriorating structure. The site has been an educational, social and cultural anchor for the community for generations. Its historical and architectural significance is reflected in the site's 1985 listing in the National Register of Historic Places and its 1995 State Antiquities Landmark designation. Rededicated in 2009 as The African American Library at the Gregory School, it continues to preserve and promote the rich history and culture of Houston's Black community. (2019)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 0.7 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 1.3 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• Rothko Chapel — 1.4 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• The Menil Collection — 1.5 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.

More markers nearby

• The Reverend Ned P. Pullum — steps away
• J. Vance Lewis — steps away
• New Zion Temple Church - Worldwide Fellowship, Inc. — steps away
• Mt. Carmel Missionary Baptist Church — steps away