Lott Canada School

The brick school of 1931 turns up in the Rosenwald Fund's own files. Fisk University's card for Beeville records a school built in 1931-32 on three acres, with a total cost of $15,800: a $1,200 grant from the fund and $14,600 listed as the public share. The building is a Bungalow-style school at 900 West Corpus Christi Street, and the National Register listed it in 2010 for its place in education and Black history. The listing's periods of significance run from 1925 to 1974.

What the plaque says

Lott Canada School With few formal schools available, education for many African Americans in the 19th century came through church instruction. In 1876, the first African American school in Bee County began in Stephen Canada's store seven miles north of Beeville. The following year, Stephen Kennedy built a small frame schoolhouse. County commissioners granted Canada and Kennedy's petition to create "Colored Community School Twelve." Beeville provided separate schools for Caucasian, African American and Mexican American students. In 1908, Beeville school trustees bought land for a new African American school from R.H. and Clara Berry. In the frame schoolhouse completed on North Burke Street, prinicipal J.R. Lockett introduced courses in agriculture and science and matched the studies of other Beeville schools. A 1929 fire destroyed the building, and students were taught in temporary quarters near the Bethlehem Missionary Baptist Church. Construction on a new school began in 1931. Financial assistance from the Julius Rosenwald fund of Chicago helped complete a brick schoolhouse with four classrooms and an auditorium. The school was named to honor Mose Lott and Allen Canada, carpenters who built the previous school which burned. The school offered ten grades, with additional years added through the 1940s. Gradual integration of Beeville schools began in 1955, with Lott Canada students attending A.C. Jones High School and the elementary school. In 1964, the Lott Canada School closed, though the school district continued to use the campus for other functions. The Lott Canada Alumni Association organized to preserve the heritage of African American education in Beeville. (2008)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Corpus Christi State Park — 24 mi
  A lake park in the South Texas brush country above Mathis, on a reservoir of the Nueces, with a Civilian Conservation Corps refectory and more than 200 bird species.
• Zaragoza Birthplace State Historic Site — 28 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.
• Presidio La Bahía — 29 mi
  A Spanish fort on its third site since 1749, held in turn by filibusters, insurgents and Fannin's Fort Defiance, rebuilt in stone in the 1960s around a chapel that never fell.
• Fannin Memorial Monument — 29 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.

More markers nearby

• Jones Chapel United Methodist Church — steps away
• American Legion Post 818 — steps away
• The Railroad in Bee County — 0.5 mi
• Commercial National Bank — 0.5 mi