Calhoun Colored School

The Calhoun Colored School was a private boarding and day school in Calhoun, Lowndes County, Alabama, about 28mi southwest of the capital of Montgomery. Founded in 1892 by Miss Charlotte Thorn and Miss Mabel Dillingham in partnership with Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute, to provide education to rural black students, who comprised the majority in this area, the Calhoun Colored School was first designed to educate rural African-American students according to the industrial school model common at the time.In addition, the school sponsored a land bank that helped 85 families buy land. It created a joint venture with the county to improve a local road so farmers could get their products to market. As the school developed, it raised its standards, created a large library, and offered more of an academic curriculum.The principal's house, the only surviving original building, has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places in recognition of the school's importance in the history of education of African Americans.HistoryIn 1891, the United States was still adjusting to the aftermath of the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Financial Panic of 1873. Many African Americans living in the rural South worked under the sharecropping system. The dependence of southern agriculture on cotton, whose price continued to drop, contributed to difficulties in the South making economic progress. African Americans, then called "colored" or "Negro", living in Calhoun (Lowndes County), Alabama were subject to white political and social domination although they comprised the majority of the county's population.