Jonas Edward Johnson, valedictorian at Alcorn A&M, and Bertha LaBranche Johnson, who studied under Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee, founded the Prentiss Normal and Industrial Institute in June 1907. They and other Black neighbors bought the former Magee plantation property, which included a one-story house said to have been built around 1820 for Tobias and Nancy Magee, of longleaf pine hand-sawn by enslaved workers. A semicircle of the plantation's cabins for enslaved people stood north of the house until the 1920s, when they were demolished and the house was moved about a hundred feet. The house, on the old Fort Stephens Road to Natchez, became the Johnsons' home and first classroom.
Forty children came, and many parents paid tuition with vegetables, chickens and eggs. The state licensed the school as a high school in 1909 and as a junior college in 1931. By 1934 it had 500 acres and 340 students, and by J. E. Johnson's death in 1953 more than 700. The 1926 concrete-block Rosenwald building was paid for by the Julius Rosenwald Fund. In 1955 the school began working with the Heifer Project, and when the second shipment of cattle came on Christmas Day it asked local white farmers to help share the animals with needy white families, an unprecedented gesture in Jim Crow Mississippi.
Enrollment fell to 150 by 1981, and the school closed in 1989. Alumni restored the Rosenwald building, which is on the National Register, and rededicated it on February 24, 2013. It holds an auditorium, classrooms and a museum.
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