Ash Creek (Pelham) School
Frost, Navarro County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Ash Creek School District No. 105 began in 1899 in the historically African-American Pelham community. School was held in Wesley Chapel Church until 1908, when a two-story schoolhouse was built near the Pelham Cemetery. The first principal was T. J. Douglas. The Pelham School operated for all 12 grades, allowing students to attend colleges and universities after graduation. In October 1921, trustees bought three acres for a new school partially funded by the Rosenwald Foundation of Chicago. The new schoolhouse had four large classrooms and two smaller rooms. In 1962, a new Pelham school building opened. The high school closed in 1965, and three years later all grades consolidated with Dawson Independent School District. (2009)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Founded in 1899 in the historically African-American community of Pelham, this school first met in the local Methodist chapel before a two-story schoolhouse rose near the cemetery in 1908. Uncommon for a rural Black school of its era, it taught all twelve grades, sending graduates on to college. In 1921 its trustees drew on the Chicago-based Rosenwald Foundation—Julius Rosenwald's landmark partnership with Southern Black communities—to build a larger school, which served until consolidation in the 1960s.
Why it matters
It stands as evidence of how African-American families in the Jim Crow South pooled their own resources with Rosenwald support to secure a full education for their children when the state would not.
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Related people
- · T. J. Douglas
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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Wesley Chapel Methodist Church
Frost, TX
Organized in 1877 at the forks of Richland and Ash creeks by an itinerant Methodist preacher, this congregation first gathered in a log schoolhouse before building its own sanctuaries, rebuilt in 1911 and again in 1934. It became a cornerstone of the rural, historically African-American Pelham community—home to the Sunday school where the area's children learned and the outreach that sustained its members young and old.
Pelham Community
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Founded by Black families after 1866 and first called Forks of the Creek, Pelham was one of the freedmen's communities that took root in Texas after emancipation. Its residents organized churches — Wesley Methodist, Brown's Chapel A.M.E., and Union Baptist — the first of which also housed the community's school. Renamed Pelham when it won a post office in 1898, the town peaked at 350 people in 1926; though its stores, gin, and schools are gone, its heritage endures.