Historic site receives official marker
Story by Carol Pappas
Submitted Photos
Jennifer Gover gazed up at the historic marker with gold letters etched across the deep blue background and smiled.
It was that unmistakable look of satisfaction at the end of a long journey home, her work was done. St. Clair County Training School is now an official, historical landmark.
The school is already listed in the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage. Thee marker with the official seal of the Alabama Historical Association was erected by the St. Clair County Training School Alumni Association, led by President Don Allen and Vice President Barbara Collins.
In late June, alumni unveiled the marker in a special ceremony at the Pell City school site, now known as The Legacy Center, during the Alumni Association’s reunion weekend.
The marker tells the story of the school and its origin – history Gover researched and worked in collaboration with the Historical Commission to develop.
It was dedicated in 1922 as “the Colored Industrial Institute, also called the Rosenwald Negro School at Pell City.” It began as a one-room classroom on two acres with one teacher. The land purchase and construction were made possible through the Julius Rosenwald Foundation and local community matching funds totaling $2,900.
A 1922 Birmingham News story described it as “the largest and best equipped school for Negroes in St. Clair County.”
In 1934, the state Board of Education was requested to change the name to St. Clair County Training School and add an extra teacher. Four years later, the St. Clair Board of Education approved extending the high school department to meet training school requirements and the state department approved the name change.
As part of the federal New Deal Program, the Public Works Administration allotted funds to build two more classrooms and make repairs.
From its beginning in 1922, the school educated Blacks in the surrounding communities of Pell City, Cropwell, Riverside, Piney Woods, Ragland and Acmar with the final class graduating in 1969 when the school closed for integration – 15 years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision called for an end to “separate but equal” schools.
Over 100 people attended the June ceremony, where former elementary school principal and SCCTS alumnus Thelma O’Neal Jones delivered the keynote address. “Our grandparents dreamed of a better future for us,” Jones told the crowd. “We were the first generation of education achievements,” many of whom went on to college.
The lessons they learned there extended well beyond academics. They were lessons “upon which our lives were built,” she said. “We celebrate more than a building. We celebrate a legacy.”
Videssa Woods talked of the history of the school and its importance in all of the alumni’s lives. “Without history,” she asked them to remember, “there is no present.”
