Anadarko Rosenwald School
Laneville vicinity, Rusk County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1868, former slaves of Julien Devereaux's Monte Verdi plantation settled the surrounding community of Anadarko (Anadarco). Land for the church and community was provided by descendants of the Devereaux family. Church records indicate that in 1868 newly freed African Americans led by Reverend Green Lewis and his wife, Phoebe Devereaux, established the Anadarko Christian Church. The first public school for African Americans was held in the Anadarko Christian Church. In 1917, Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and Booker T. Washington established the Rosenwald Fund to assist in the foundation of schools for African Americans in the South. With money from the Rosenwald Fund ($900), public donations ($2,100) and private contributions from students and parents ($600), the Anadarko Colored "Rosenwald" School was built in 1926. The building was a three-teacher school typical of the rural schools built by the Rosenwald Foundation. Over the years, the name of the school changed several times to Laneville Colored School to Allen High School (named for U. E. Allen, former principal) prior to merging with the Laneville Independent School District. The old classrooms were moved to expand the campus during the years 1967-69 to accommodate additional students after integration. The only remnant of this historic Rosenwald School is the pier and beam foundation where the gymnasium was erected. The building may no longer function but the memory of the first public school in the area will live on as an important reminder of early African American educational efforts. (2016)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1868 formerly enslaved people from the Devereaux plantation founded the community of Anadarko and the Anadarko Christian Church, which hosted the area's first Black public school. With $900 from Julius Rosenwald's fund, plus public and family donations, a three-teacher Rosenwald School was built here in 1926, later renamed for principal U. E. Allen. Only the gymnasium's pier-and-beam foundation now remains of the school that served the community until integration.
Why it matters
The school is a local chapter of the Rosenwald program, the landmark partnership between a Sears magnate and Booker T. Washington that built thousands of schools for Black children across the Jim Crow South.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The story here begins in 1868, in the first years after emancipation, when the people freed from bondage on a Rusk County plantation set about the hard, hopeful work of building their own community. Across the South in these Reconstruction years, freedpeople were founding churches, schools, and settlements — the institutions of a self-governing life they had been denied.
Education stood near the center of that effort. For generations, teaching enslaved people to read had been discouraged or outright forbidden, so the freedom to learn was itself a form of liberation. Again and again, the first schoolhouse in a Black community after the war was its church, doing double duty on weekdays.
But the promise of Reconstruction gave way to the long constraint of Jim Crow. As segregation hardened into law across the South, Black schools were chronically underfunded, left to make do while white schools received the lion's share of public money. That inequality is the backdrop against which this community's determination — and the Rosenwald partnership that later aided it — has to be understood.
People & events
In 1868, formerly enslaved people from Julien Devereaux's Monte Verdi plantation settled the surrounding community and named it Anadarko. Land for the church and the community was provided by descendants of the Devereaux family. That same year, led by the Reverend Green Lewis and his wife, Phoebe Devereaux, the freed community established the Anadarko Christian Church — and it was inside that church that the area's first public school for African Americans was held.
Decades later, in 1917, two men joined forces to help communities like this one: Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and Booker T. Washington, the nation's most prominent Black educator. Their Rosenwald Fund offered seed money to build schools for African American children across the South — but only if the community matched it, an arrangement meant to build local ownership and stir public support.
Anadarko met the challenge. The Anadarko "Rosenwald" School, built in 1926, was paid for by $900 from the Rosenwald Fund, $2,100 in public donations, and $600 contributed directly by students and parents — a three-teacher school of a type common across the rural South. Over the years its name changed with the times: Laneville Colored School, then Allen High School, honoring former principal U. E. Allen, before it merged into the Laneville Independent School District. When integration came, the old classrooms were moved between 1967 and 1969 to expand the campus, and today only the pier-and-beam foundation of the gymnasium remains.
Its place in the American story
This one Rusk County school is a local chapter of one of the most remarkable education stories in American history. The Rosenwald program — the partnership of a Chicago retail magnate and the founder of Tuskegee — helped build thousands of schools for Black children across the segregated South, reshaping educational opportunity for a generation.
What makes the story so moving is the matching-funds model and what it reveals. The dollar figures on this marker tell it plainly: the outside grant was real and important, but families who had little gave what they could, and the community raised more than twice the fund's contribution. These schools were not charity handed down; they were built by the very people they served, in defiance of a system designed to shortchange them.
The school's arc also traces the larger sweep of Black American history — from a community founded by freedpeople in 1868, through the long decades of segregated "colored" schools, to integration in the 1960s. That the building is largely gone, remembered by a foundation and a marker, is itself part of the story: the physical traces of Black institutional life have too often vanished, which makes the act of marking them all the more important.
If you visit
Come knowing that most of what mattered here is no longer standing. The tangible remnant is the pier-and-beam foundation where the gymnasium once stood — humble, easy to overlook, and worth pausing over. Let it anchor your imagination: from this footprint, reconstruct the three-teacher schoolhouse and the community that built it.
Read the marker slowly, especially the dollar amounts. There is something quietly powerful in seeing that parents and students themselves put in $600 — real money, given by people who had precious little of it — for the sake of their children's education. That detail turns an abstract national program into a specific act of hope on this ground.
As a stop on a road trip through East Texas, this is a place for reflection rather than spectacle. It fits naturally alongside other sites of African American and Reconstruction history in the region, and it rewards the traveler who is willing to stand in a quiet spot and take the full measure of what was accomplished here — and what was lost.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Green Lewis
- · Phoebe Devereaux
- · Julius Rosenwald
- · Booker T. Washington
- · U. E. Allen
Themes & tags
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