Greene County

The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (The Freedmen’s Bureau), inaugurated in March 1865, was active in Greeneville by that September. R.J. Creswell reported “The Freedmen are more intelligent and the whites more friendly than at any other Post yet visited by the writer.”

In March 1867, one of Andrew Johnson’s former bondsmen, Samuel Johnson, wrote President Johnson that he had been appointed one of the “Commissioner(s) of the Freedmens Bureau, to raise money with which to purchase a suitable Lot on which to build a School House for the education of the Coloured children of Greeneville.”  Johnson deeded an acre of land adjoining his property to Samuel Johnson, and six other trustees for “church and schoolhouse purposes.“ 

The Bureau paid to lease buildings, provided completion funds for freedmen schools on donated or purchased land, and paid the salaries of teachers, as well as facilitating the work of religious aid societies. In February 1869, a  report from Malvina Higgins , of Ithaca, New York, who was sponsored by the Presbyterian Committee of Home Missions, reported that she and Ella Boyd, both white, had named their school, in a building owned by the freedmen the “Providence School,” adding, “The rebel portion are greatly afflicted over our school.” The Providence School had a total attendance of 100 as did a ”Sabbath School” held in the same building. According to local tradition, Mt. Bethel Presbyterian loaned pews to a Freedmen’s Bureau school in Greeneville.

A purposeful link between church and school can be seen in the  Second Annual Report of the Freedmen’s Department of the Presbyterian Committee of Home Missions  (1870), which sponsored missionaries in New Market, Knoxville, and Maryville, as well as 46 teachers across Tennessee, including four in Greeneville: “There are many locations in the Southern field where the School and Church can be planted together, and from the former be brought into the latter a membership that will in turn extend our missionary operations.”  

In the decades following the Civil War, enthusiasm for public education resulted in donations (or near donations) of land for both black and white schools in Greene County. Sometimes the gift or sale went directly to county school directors or the county board of education. Property deeds reveal names of supportive Individuals, trustees, and institutions who aided the Freedmen’s Bureau officials in their school building efforts. Freedmen’s Bureau teacher listings and documents often give the names of local citizens who taught in rural areas and reflect payments for school buildings satisfactorily completed in outlying districts of the county.

This interactive map shows the cluster of institutions around Wesley Avenue and Floral Street that started to form around 1875 and continued to grow well into the twentieth century. Earlier churches and schools were scattered to the east.  

After initially holding services in the basement of the white Presbyterian Church and the lower level of the closed Rhea Academy in downtown Greeneville, African American congregations soon began to secure their own property. The AME Zion Church (now Jones Memorial AME Zion) purchased a lot on Graveyard Street (now Nanci Lane), in 1870. The First Colored Presbyterian Church (now Tabernacle Presbyterian), secured a lot on Rankin Street in 1874.  

A new neighborhood west of downtown began to be established in the 1880s as properties were purchased by African American community leaders for schools, churches, and a public cemetery. Today, four prominent African American churches: Tate Chapel Methodist, Tabernacle Presbyterian, Jones AME Zion, and Friendship Baptist are located on or near the properties purchased in 1886 for Pleasant Hill/Wesley Cemetery and for a “colored” school or college. 

In April 1886, Elizabeth McKee sold seven acres of land to George Clem and others “for the use of a school or college for Colored persons of the East Tennessee Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church." Greeneville College, a boarding school that formed in 1887 on Floral Street in association with the AME Zion denomination, became the first high school in Greeneville. The Star of Zion, the newspaper of the AME Zion Church, provides rich documentation of the history of the school, including financial support for the school, graduation ceremonies and other events, and school president J. W. Younge’s successful efforts to revitalize the school. By 1925 the school had 210 students, including 70 boarders from elsewhere in Tennessee and bordering states. 

The deed to the Pleasant Hill Cemetery Assocation (now Wesley Cemetery), conveyed by the same Elizabeth McKee in September 1886, described the property as being bordered by Wesley Methodist Episcopal Chapel (now Tate Chapel) as well as property owned by African American Miles Morris. Among those buried in Pleasant Hill Cemetery are USCT soldier William H. McGee, Reverend Garrison E. Carter, and John H. Fort, a 1901 graduate of Lincoln University who served as pastor of Tabernacle Presbyterian church for much of the first half of the new century. 

By 1903, Friendship Baptist Church, founded in 1894, can be found on the Sanborn Fire Insurance map of Greeneville near the public school for African Americans on Railroad Street. In 1934, the church moved to Davis Street under the leadership of Rev. Stokely. In 1949 Jones Memorial AME Zion moved to the corner of Floral and Clem Streets, bordered by Wesley Cemetery, followed by Tabernacle Presbyterian on Wesley Avenue in 1953. 

Soon after the completion of the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railroad in 1858, the crossing at Bull’s Gap, where Greene, Hawkins, and Jefferson (now Hamblen) Counties intersect, was designated Rogersville Junction. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Hawkins County resident Anthony B. Keele, a Union loyalist (and attendee at the Union Convention in Greeneville, June 1861) was postmaster.

Bull’s Gap/ Rogersville Junction was a busy transportation hub, with hotels and accommodations for railroad passengers. The availability of lodgings and ease of rail access made it possible for the small town to host the 1874 Colored Convention. And for an African American minister named Peter Guinn who was serving Baptist churches in Jefferson, Greene, and Hawkins Counties, to be the featured preacher. In 1883, Peter Guinn and his wife Sarah, both Mulatto according to census records, purchased property along the railroad on South Main Street in Bulls Gap (Hawkins County) and opened a hotel to serve African American passengers. The property is listed as “Guin Peter hotel” in the 1887 edition of the Tennessee State Gazetteer and Business Directory.

In 1878,  A.B. Keele donated a piece of land  in Greene County for a church and public school to Jerry Bowers, Thos Bullen, and E. Murphy. Bowers and Murphy were teachers at the Bull’s Gap (African American) school in the 6 ^th  Civil District from 1879 to 1882. Bowers and Murphy were also church leaders; both listed as delegates, along with Peter Guinn, to the East Tennessee Baptist General Association in 1878.

The 1880 census shows that Jerry Bowers was one of three children adopted by Eliza and Jackson Bowers. The photo of the Eliza Bowers headstone in Drake Cemetery, close to the former location of the Baptist Church, provides evidence of the continuity of one family in this location. Newspaper accounts indicate burials of Jane Abram,  Robert Jackson , and other African Americans at Drake Cemetery.

A witness to Keele’s 1878 deed of gift was J.R. Huntsman, another former Bull’s Gap postmaster.  In 1888, J.R. Huntsman made a gift of his own, a property in the same 6 ^th  Civil District of Greene County, to the Methodist Episcopal Church “to be kept as a place of worship” and described as being next to the “Colored Baptist” church.  It is possible that the Methodist church known as Huntsman’s Chapel today, just outside of Bull’s Gap, was built next to the Baptist church/school house on the former Keele property. School records show that the old Bulls Gap school building fell down in 1922, and classes were held in the church until a replacement school was completed.

Today, most of the small rural African American public schools in Greene County exist only on paper. In two locations on different sides of the county one finds a small church, an adjacent cemetery, and the site of a vanished school. At Warrensburg, Houston Chapel Methodist stands next to a cemetery with burials as early as 1904. The  church cornerstone  indicates that the church was erected in 1909 and Rev. J. H. Jackson was its pastor. Marking the spot where a frame building was erected in 1910 is a set of concrete steps very similar to those found at a place called Pruitt Hill. While the exact location of an earlier school in or near Warrensburg is not known, the history of African American education here stretches back decades. Freedmen’s Bureau Records show that William Dawson, an African American teacher, was at Warrensburg in November 1869. And teachers G.M. Goodlet and Gabe Palmer were holding classes at Warrensburg as early as 1882.

At Pruitt Hill, a cemetery whose earliest burial is recorded as 1910 is located behind an active Methodist church. Still standing out in front of the church lawn is a set of concrete steps once attached to a school building. A 1910  property deed  indicates that ½ acre was deeded for a Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America to A. Dixon, Thomas Carson, Thomas Hamilton, and George Forby. Either a congregation of earlier church members, or an African American Baptist congregation in the same vicinity, may date back to 1885 when G.W. Branner is listed as pastor in East Tennessee Baptist General Association records. Somewhere nearby was a Grand United Order of Odd Fellows Lodge, granted a dispensation at Pruitt Hill 12 Sept 1887.  A photograph in Tennessee Department of Education files shows a white frame schoolhouse with a well-dressed man in a three-piece suit standing on wooden steps. While school records indicate that a Pruitt Hill School was constructed around 1916, teachers Bertha Williams, Pearl Manuel, Willie Ganaway and others had been providing instruction in Pruitt Hill for nearly ten years.