Site of Shiloh School

The Fisk University Rosenwald Fund card for Gregg County's Shilow School, as it is spelled there, dates it to 1920-21 and gives a total cost of $2,700. The Black community raised $700, public funds supplied $1,200 and the Rosenwald Fund gave $800. Together the community and the public paid $1,900 of the $2,700, or about 70 percent. A separate Fisk photograph record, dated 1917 to 1938, shows the school and a teachers' home at Shiloh.

What the plaque says

Site of Shiloh School The newly freed African Americans of the Shiloh community established a school for their children shortly after the Civil War. The one-room building was demolished in the late 1800s and classes were held at the Shiloh Baptist Church. With financial assistance from the Julius Rosenwald fund, a new two-room school was erected in 1920. It was replaced by a large brick building in the 1930s. The high school was closed in 1949; the end of segregation closed the rest of the Shiloh School in 1966. Shiloh graduates became contributing citizens in Texas and the nation. Long vacant, the school building was later used to store chemicals for a plastics company and burned in 1993. (1998)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• East Texas Oil Museum — 13 mi
  A Kilgore College museum that rebuilds the 1930s oil boom in a full-scale Boomtown with a general store, drugstore and newspaper office, plus dioramas, films and antiques given by East Texans.
• New London Museum and Cenotaph — 23 mi
  A volunteer-run museum beside the pink granite cenotaph for the March 1937 school gas explosion, holding a model of the school, a blackboard from that day and an odorizer device.
• Tyler State Park — 25 mi
  A 985-acre park eight miles north of Tyler, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps from 1935 to 1941 around a 64-acre spring-fed lake, with more than 13 miles of trails.
• Camp Ford Historic Park — 27 mi
  A free county park north of Tyler on the site of the largest Confederate prison camp west of the Mississippi, with a kiosk, an interpretive trail and a historical society museum downtown.

More markers nearby

• Shiloh Baptist Church — steps away
• Upshur County Discovery Well — 1.5 mi
• White Oak Independent School District — 2.9 mi
• Gregg County Discovery Oil Well, F. K. Lathrop A-1, Aransas Fuel Oil Co. — 3.1 mi