A Lesson In History
The walls of a dismantled black schoolhouse reveal its history
By Anne Radford
Photos: St. Louis County
St. Louis County Parks is in the process of moving and reconstructing a significant building to the Historic Village at Faust Park. This year marks the 129th anniversary of Missouri’s oldest-surviving, one-room schoolhouse. African Schoolhouse No. 4 was built for the education of African American children in West St. Louis County. After years of not having a school for black children, area residents successfully sued in 1893 to have community-supported education for those children in the Chesterfield area. Prior to that, the district had refused to abide by legislation requiring schools to be created for black children based on the area’s population. According to the laws at that time, a minimum number of 20 school-age children were required to establish a school.
Fighting For An Education
Chesterfield Historic Landmark and Preservation Committee
While the original school was being constructed, Chesterfield school directors sent the students to the neighboring Hilltown district, and paid for their schooling for nine months. The total cost of the “Chesterfield African School” was $600. Completed in 1894, the building is a 15-foot by 19-foot, single-room, log structure covered by siding, with chalkboards painted on the interior walls. There was no playground equipment, nor a restroom inside.
Within a few years, the school was fully operational, closing only for the summer break. In 1896, Plessy vs Ferguson gave lawful power to the separate-but-equal doctrine, which kept black and white children separated within schools across the nation. In practice, however, African American schools were rarely equal. Records indicate that white schools were funded at a level three times the amount that black schools received. In addition, black schools were not neighborhood schools in the same sense as white schools. African American children often had to walk long distances to their schools, often passing white neighborhood schools on the way. St. Louis County was no exception, and black students were often given inferior buildings and instructional materials.
In schoolhouses such as African Schoolhouse No. 4, education past the eighth grade wasn’t the norm. One teacher taught about a dozen students in first through eighth grades. After half a century of operation, the school closed in the 1950s when it merged with the Orrville School. The remaining African American schools in the area were closed in the 1963-1964 school year, when the schools were finally integrated. That decision was made 10 years after the United States Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that ruled racial segregation of children in schools was unconstitutional.
Etched In Time
Eventually, the schoolhouse was sold along with the surrounding property. Over time, new owners built a house and converted the school into a one-car garage. The history of the former schoolhouse was almost lost. Jesse Francis, Cultural Sites Manager at Faust Park, said converting the schoolhouse into a garage was a blessing in disguise. If the previous owners hadn't turned it into a garage and repaired the roof, it would likely have collapsed during the floods of 1993.
“It probably would have been lost,” he says. “The thing that makes me a little giddy about this schoolhouse is that you can see how they made it. This, I think, was a group effort.”
Despite its use for other purposes since the 1950s, the schoolhouse still bears markers of the past, such as the black paint where chalkboards used to be, and old schoolbooks on the windowsills that were damaged in the flood of 1993.
Recently, the schoolhouse and surrounding property were sold again. After years of failed negotiations with former owners, the new owner recognized a unique opportunity and generously donated the schoolhouse. To fund the move and reconstruction, St. Louis County Parks Foundation contributed significant financial support—recognizing the value the building brings to the community and county.
“This is the oldest African-American schoolhouse in Missouri, and it is important to keep its legacy of students and teachers alive for current and future generations to see and experience in person,” says Mark Ohlendorf, President of the Parks Foundation. “We look forward to restoring this important part of St. Louis County history and making it a permanent part of Faust Park.”
Like Reading A Book
Moving log structures and saving history, however, come at a steep price. Dismantling and bringing the materials to the park cost $15,000, and the remainder of the restoration is estimated to cost $20,000, to be covered by the foundation. The foundation is a non-profit, volunteer organization created to support and promote the facilities, programs, capital improvements, and resources of the county’s network of 75 parks that span 12,700 acres.
Doris Frazier, a Chesterfield resident who served as a substitute teacher at the school, says she’s grateful this history is being preserved. At age 19, she taught first through eighth grades. She created lesson plans for each grade and taught on four chalkboards around the room. She says it wasn’t easy.
“You had to be everybody,” she says. “You had to be the gym teacher, the arithmetic teacher, the reading teacher. So, you had to be kind of experienced in all of those classes to keep the kids interested. It’s a long, long day.”
Jesse Francis and his team at Faust Park have been meticulously disassembling, photographing, and tagging every inch of the wooden schoolhouse. It’s clear that a lot of time and care went into building it. “In some ways,” he says, “it’s like reading a book. The craftsmanship tells its own story.” He adds that the original logs and bookshelves remain intact, and while crews were dismantling the schoolhouse, they found chalkboards with math equations still present.
Staff members spent an intense four weeks moving the schoolhouse to Faust Park, where it lay in storage while plans and permits were obtained. Upon its arrival, volunteer woodworkers began repairing two windows and restoring the others. One had been made into a doorway for the garage, and the other was simply gone. Window frames have been repaired, scraped, primed, and painted by staff members and volunteers.
“We want to bring it back to where it was when those children went to school here,” Ohlendorf says. “That’s why we’re looking at the paints and anything we can find to see what it looked like back then so that we can do it.”
Faust Park’s Historic Village preserves the area’s local architecture and history. The village consists of four homes and other structures, including another schoolhouse, carriage house, barns, and blacksmith shop. African Schoolhouse No. 4 will be restored, furnished, and maintained for future generations.
Interpretive signage will tell the story of black students in the county and the families who sued to have a school built for their children. The school’s new location will be next to the historic Alt Schoolhouse, which was a white school during the same time. Paired together, these two schoolhouses will tell the story of an important and painful chapter in St. Louis County history—when children were taught in different schools based on the color of their skin, and the laws and policies of the day that enforced and promoted this practice.
Anne Radford, CPRP, CPO, is the Public Information Manager for the Saint Louis County Parks in St. Louis, Mo. Reach her at aradford@stlouiscountymo.gov.