Fayette County

During the Civil War, the federal army established its first “Contraband Camp” in Tennessee at Grand Junction, four or five miles east of La Grange, in Hardeman County. Self-emancipated African Americans and refugees fleeing conflict gravitated to Union lines. Soldiers who wished to fight for their freedom and the families of these newly recruited U.S. Colored Troops also sought protection and employment. These two towns, well documented in military records as well as regimental and personal memoirs, bear witness to the initial impetus behind the formation of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and offer useful examples of post-Civil War community settlement.

Once the war ended, representatives of the Freedmen’s Bureau began working with missionary associations and local community leaders and congregations to establish schools for African American children. Some of the teachers recruited by the Bureau included former United States Colored Troops (USCT). In Somerville, the Bureau first made arrangements to hold classes taught by a white teacher in a former private school building. In La Grange, school organizers rented a building for use as a school.

By 1868, the "Mission School" was in operation in La Grange, with 44 pupils and two "Colored" teachers, one of whom was Elder B. William Wilkins. In his monthly school report to the Freedmen's Bureau, which listed the Advent Mission as sponsor and named Mrs. E. Dabbs as owner of the school building, he wrote that the public response to his school was “favorable.”

By 1868-1869, four other Freedmen’s Bureau schools, all with African American teachers, were operating in more isolated parts of Fayette County. Scott’s Chapel, at Gallaway, and the Shelton School in Oakland were one-teacher schools on private property as was  Cedar Grove School , which was on a large plantation. Freedmen’s Bureau records also reveal that a school in operation at Union Hill by 1870 was being held in a building owned by "colored people."

 Freedmen's Bureau Monthly Teachers Report December 1868 for Shelton's School in Oakland, Fayette County, TN , signed by African American teacher James Netherland. The report indicates that there were 15 pupils at this school and the building was owned by a Mr. Shelton. Freedmens Bureau Marriage Records from the Memphis Field Office show that James Netherland Company C was married to Joice Netherland on 29 January 1865. By 1880, Netherland with his wife Joycy and five children are living in District 7, where he is both a farmer and a magistrate.

John A. Reid, a white farmer owning 35 acres of land near Macon,  donated one acre of his land  to "the colored population of Macon and Vicinity and their children after them." This 1870 deed dates from the years immediately following the establishment of Freedmen's Bureau schools. It indicates that there was already a school building on this property near Macon when the land was donated. Perhaps this property transfer was intended to confirm its original use as a Freedmen's School.

The Fisk University Rosenwald Fund Card File Database includes school buildings constructed under the Julius Rosenwald Fund program, a partnership that provided partial funding for community-supported African American schools from the late 1910s to the 1930s. These records list 21 schools in Fayette County, one of the largest numbers of any county in Tennessee. A few locations were selected for the Tuskegee program, which preceded the formal Rosenwald initiative. In a county with a majority Black population sustained primarily by agriculture, these small one and two teacher schools were almost exclusively rural. Some sites, first established during the days of the Freedmen’s Bureau, persisted as locations of schools and churches through several decades of segregated education.

Margaret Ware, one of the first teachers hired at the Training School, was also the county supervisor for the [Anna T.] Jeanes Negro Rural School initiative, which helped fund the school initially. She was a driving force behind getting community support for the Rosenwald schools as well. In 1929, she sent a letter to Julius Rosenwald in which she expressed gratitude for the Rosenwald school program. Her  Letter to Rosenwald  was published in The Broadcaster, the journal of the Tennessee State Association of Teachers in Colored Schools. 

By September 1866, a white teacher sponsored by the American Missionary Association and Western Freedmen's Aid Society was holding classes for 72 pupils in a former academy building in Somerville. The teacher at this school, called the Gustavus School, was Isaac M. Newton. Some white residents apparently did have problems with schools providing instruction for African American pupils as evidenced by other reports of both white and African American teachers. In his  June 1868 report , Newton wrote that he had been "brickbatted" and forced to close the school. And he added this poignant personal note to his final report: "I feel much interest in the work among the Freedmen and think I may be able to engage in the work another year, but not at Somerville unless protected by a military force."

By September 1869, John P Spurlock, was at Somerville, perhaps to re-open the school. A  list of teachers in Freedmen's Bureau schools for 1869-1870  included L [J.] P. Spurlock in the 8th Civil District of Fayette County.

The histories of two churches located in downtown Somerville underscore the determination and agency of local African American church leaders. An 1872 deed for Morris Chapel CME Church, found in transcription in WPA church survey records, records a circa 1855 proxy purchase on behalf of five African American church trustees. The $600 sale price for a town lot represents a substantial investment in real estate.

 An 1881 deed for Mt Zion Missionary Baptist  shows a $150 sale of town lot number 3 to church deacons, and also grants them the use of a shared well on adjoining property owned by the same Somerville attorney.

Newspaper accounts from the early decades of the 20 ^th  century show these churches were also at the center of African American civic life. A News of the Colored People column in the white Fayette Falcon newspaper gave notice of a 1918 meeting of the Fayette County Branch of the NAACP at Mt. Zion, and 1921 reports in the same newspaper publicized Red Cross and Farmers Day meetings at Morris Chapel Church.

The Fayette County Training School, a six-room building situated on nine acres about a mile and a half south of Somerville, was constructed in 1915 and 1916. Fraternal and benevolent lodges in the county galvanized public support for the construction of the new school, with 1200 citizens to giving a dollar each. These funds were supplemented by $500 by the [Anna T.] Jeanes Negro Rural School Fund and $1500 by the county and state.

W. P. and Margaret Ware, both graduates of Knoxville College, were the first of the four teachers hired at the new school. Principal Ware organized and promoted community events at the school, including county fairs, agricultural clubs, farmers conferences, and summer schools for teachers. Mrs. Ware, a trained nurse who was initially the home economics teacher at the school, was the Jeanes schools county supervisor for 24 years. She was also “the moving spirit” behind the efforts to build Rosenwald schools in the county.

The initial enrollment in the school included 435 students from across the county. Many students lived miles from the school and juggled school activities with work at home. Clara Coleman, pictured here in a one-horse buggy with her sister and brother in front of the school, was up to these challenges. A note on the back of a copy of the photo highlights her daily routine and dedication to getting an education: “Milks 5 cows, helps mother with breakfast, dresses neatly and drives 5 miles over rough roads to school. Out of 100 days of session she had attended 93. Little sister & brother with her.”

During the Civil War, Union officers, including General U.S. Grant, stayed in some of the stately homes in La Grange and soldiers were billeted on the grounds of the former male academy. A large Freedmen camp was located nearby, in proximity to the Wolf River access directly south and the railroads that crossed at Grand Junction.

La Grange is a small, once wealthy town where planters and businessmen mingled in proximity of Tennessee and Mississippi plantations and whites and the African American families who worked for them lived in close proximity. The story of La Grange can still be told in the La Grange cemetery, which has a large section of African American burials, and in the buildings and storefronts of a two-block business district at the intersection of the principal east west and north south roads going through southern Fayette County.

Just behind the main commercial strip lies a neighborhood several streets wide not far from an historic 1843 brick church building. According to local historians, the wooden pews of Immanuel Episcopal Church, which had a balcony section for African American congregants, were used as coffin materials for soldiers during the American Civil War. 

By April 1868 there was a Freedmen school in operation, a two-teacher “Mission School” taught by Elder B. William Wilkins with 44 pupils. His monthly report to the Freedmen’s Bureau shows that Mrs. E. Dabbs owned the school building and that both teachers there were "colored." According to the U.S. Census for 1880, E.J. Dabbs, a white widow, was living in the town of La Grange with three daughters, one son, and two young African Americans, classified as a farmer and a servant, in her home. On one side was a black household and on the other, a similarly mixed household.  

Today, on the southbound edge of "town" a one-story cement block church stands today next to an older two-story frame building. According to local tradition it once held a fraternal lodge meeting hall and a funeral home.  Visible just around the corner is a one-room frame school building at the corner of Commerce and Chestnut Streets. 

Property deeds record the 1875 purchase of a prominent lot on Main Street by an African American minister named Silas Phillips. One of the witnesses to the sale by white property owner Theo Wilkinson was L.J. Adair, whose general store was on Main Street. A further sale, in 1912, to trustees of the National Mosaic Templars of America, an African American benevolent organization, suggests that a lodge building was erected on the property. African American fraternal and benevolent organizations were important community institutions in the decades following the Civil War. They typically assisted with burial costs and their names and designations can often be found on headstones.

The story of La Grange can also be told in La Grange cemetery, which has a large section of African American burials. Here can be found the distinctive while marble headstones of USCT soldiers like Benjamin Reeves and those of S[amuel] W. Wadley and Sennie Johnson, which bear insignias for the Joshua Temple and  Zephro Chamber of the Mosaic Templars. 

Oakland, on the main road between Somerville and Memphis, was the largest town in northern Fayette County. By 1868, the African American population was supporting its own Freedmen school, taught by a U.S.C.T. veteran from East Tennessee, James Netherland. Freedmen’s Bureau Marriage Records from the Memphis Field Office show that James Netherland, Company C, was married to Joice Netherland on 29 January 1865. His monthly Teachers Report for December 1868 indicates that there were 15 pupils at the Oakland school and the building was owned by a Mr. Shelton. James Netherland chose to settle permanently in Fayette County. By 1880 he and his wife and five children were living in District 7, where he was both a farmer and a magistrate. 

Property deeds tell another story of citizen advocacy for African American institutions in Oakland. An 1877 purchase of a former white Methodist church building on a one-acre lot by trustees of two African American congregations, Baptist and Methodist, was for both church and school purposes. Later deeds related to this still-standing church building show that CME trustees acquired the church property and additional acreage in 1905 for a parsonage; part of that property was deeded for a school in 1917; and a half ownership in the adjacent Masonic Lodge property was sold to the Odd Fellows in 1920.

Across the road, the site of a large public school today, was where the Oakland Rosenwald School, also known as Mebane School, once stood. African American farm owner Leonard J. Mebane and his wife Lula donated the two acres for the school in 1919. In 1947, trustees representing the Oakland Colored School, apparently never constructed on the property set aside by the church, donated an additional acre of land to the Board of Education.

In rural sections of Fayette County, the acquisition of land and buildings that became locations of African American schools, churches, and benevolent and fraternal lodges are reflected in property deeds that date back to the 1870s and 1880s. These documents almost always reference the Civil District in which the property was located. The  map of Fayette County, Tennessee, showing civil districts  (Tennessee State Library and Archives) , created as required by Tennessee's new Constitution in 1835, reflects those early districts.

Historic sites of schools and churches in the vicinity of Gallaway and Braden, both in Civil District 6, can be connected to land purchased or donated by African American residents, some of whom had been Union soldiers during the American Civil War.

Scotts Chapel, just north of Gallaway, was the name of an early Freedmen school taught by African American teacher W.C. Anderson in a white-owned building. An African American Methodist Church was in place by the 1880s. Scotts Chapel cemetery holds the remains of early church leader William Bess. His daughter, Leana, was only 16 when she became superintendent of the church's sunday school in 1886. Her short articles in the Southwestern Christian Advocate covered church news, death announcements, and  a plea for temperance reform .

By 1870, there was a freedmen's school at Union Hill, east of Gallaway held in a building owned by African Americans. In 1878, Susan Broomfield, listed in the 1880 census as Mulatto, sold one-half  acre of land  on which there was already a Missionary Baptist church to a group of trustees that included Milton Whyte [White]. Two years later, Broomfield’s marriage to Black farmer named Riley Brient (or O'Bryant) was officiated by the Reverend Milton Whyte.

Community historians and genealogists Dravidi Pasha and John Marshall helped connect Broomfield’s deed to Union Hill Missionary Baptist Church and Union Hill School. Nelson Bolds [Boals, Boldes, Bowles], Mr. Pasha’s third great-grandfather,  sold one acre to Union Hill Church  in 1907. The surname on the deed appears as “Boals." In 1913,  Union Hill Church trustees' deed of gift to the Fayette County Board of Education  provided one-eighth acre of land near Gallaway, presumably for an African American public school.

Heseltine Ellington’s obituary mentions that she had been a member of the Union Hill Baptist Church back to the 1870s. Both she and her husband, Peter, were buried in the church cemetery. Their son, W. S. (William Singleton) Ellington, the pastor of two Nashville Baptist churches in the first half of the twentieth century, would have likely attended the church with his mother and enrolled in a school at or near Union Hill. Soon after graduating from Fisk University in 1894, Ellington gave his first “Prodigal Son” sermon, fittingly, at a rural church in West Tennessee. Beginning in the 1920s, the sermon was broadcast on WSM radio. Ellington gave his fifty-seventh annual sermon about six months before his death in 1949.