Barefield School
Refugio, Refugio County, Texas
Marker Inscription
African Americans were denied access to education while enslaved, but opportunities emerged after emancipation. The first African American school in Refugio was held in a shotgun building on the corner of Santiago and Osage Streets. The school, known as the Refugio Colored School, later moved to the corner of Alamo and King Streets. The school had no running water so the boys carried water from Osage Street for drinking purposes. The students also found and cut firewood during the winter months to heat the school and were responsible for maintenance of the building. In 1927, the school burned. Professor A.T. Barefield arranged for classes to be held at the Bob Button Dance Hall and then at Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church. Beginning in 1917, Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears Roebuck Company, began to provide matching funds for African American schools in the south. By 1929, a new two-room stucco building was erected on East Commons Street through the Rosenwald school building program. The school was later named Barefield School after professor A.T. Barefield, an educator in Refugio from 1902 to 1949, who promoted education and good citizenship within the black community. As attendance grew, the board of trustees approved to move one of the two-room buildings from the white school to the Negro school grounds. The Rosenwald School no longer exists but the 1933 addition still stands at commons and bayou streets. The Barefield School was the only Rosenwald School in Refugio County and was a symbol of vision and progress for the community during the early 1900s. (2013)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Barred from schooling under slavery, Refugio's African American community built its own after emancipation, first in a rented shotgun house where students hauled their own water and cut firewood to heat the room. After fire destroyed an early school in 1927, classes met in a dance hall and a church until a two-room stucco building rose in 1929 through the Rosenwald program, which matched local funds for Black schools across the South. The school was later named for A.T. Barefield, an educator here from 1902 to 1949.
Why it matters
As the only Rosenwald school in Refugio County, Barefield embodies the national partnership that built thousands of schools for Black children in the segregated South, and the communities who sustained them.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When the Civil War ended and slavery with it, roughly four million formerly enslaved people across the South faced a hard, hopeful question: what would freedom actually build? For millions, the answer began with a schoolhouse. Under slavery, teaching a Black person to read had been forbidden or punished, so the hunger for learning that surged after emancipation was immense — and largely unmet by the states that had just lost the war.
Refugio sits on the Texas coastal plain, a small county seat with deep Spanish and Mexican roots long before it became part of the United States. In the decades after the war and into the early 1900s — the era of Reconstruction giving way to Jim Crow — Texas, like the rest of the South, ran its public schools on a rigidly separate and profoundly unequal basis. Black communities were taxed for schools they were then barred from, and the schools they were permitted usually meant whatever the community could raise, build, and maintain itself.
That is the backdrop against which Refugio's African American families did something quietly remarkable: they made a school out of almost nothing, and then kept making one, again and again, each time it was lost.
People & events
The first classes met in a shotgun house — that narrow, one-room-deep building form found across the Gulf South — on a street corner in town, and the school moved at least once more before finding steadier footing. There was no running water; the boys of the school carried it by hand from a nearby street so their classmates could drink. In winter, students hunted and cut the firewood that heated the room, and the upkeep of the building fell to the children and their families. Every detail of that inscription tells you the community was not given a school. It grew one.
Then, in 1927, fire took it. Rather than let the loss end the story, Professor A.T. Barefield arranged for classes to carry on in borrowed rooms — first a local dance hall, then Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church. It is worth pausing on that improvisation: a teacher refusing to let a single school year lapse, moving his students from a hall to a sanctuary so the work would not stop.
Relief came through an unlikely partnership. Beginning in 1917, Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, put his fortune behind a program that offered matching funds to Black communities building schools across the South. Refugio's families raised their share, and by 1929 a new two-room stucco building stood on East Commons Street. As enrollment grew, the trustees even relocated one of the white school's two-room buildings onto the grounds. In time the school took the name of the man who had held it together — A.T. Barefield, who taught in Refugio from 1902 to 1949 and pressed on his students both learning and good citizenship.
Its place in the American story
The Rosenwald program was one of the largest private efforts to educate Black children in American history. Across the segregated South, it helped build thousands of schools, and by the time the program wound down a very large share of the region's rural Black children were being taught in a Rosenwald school. Crucially, these were never simple gifts. The model required the Black community to raise money, donate land, and supply labor, then matched what they gathered — which is why the schools became sources of fierce local pride. They were, quite literally, built with the community's own hands and dollars.
Barefield was the only Rosenwald school in Refugio County, which makes it a single visible thread in a vast national fabric. Multiply this one coastal Texas town — the fire, the borrowed church, the matched funds, the stucco walls — by thousands of communities, and you begin to grasp how a generation of Black Southerners was educated in the teeth of a system designed to keep them from it.
The schools also seeded something larger. The self-organization, fundraising, and leadership that built and sustained them helped form the civic muscle that later generations would draw on. A schoolhouse was never only a schoolhouse.
If you visit
The original Rosenwald building here is gone, but a 1933 addition still stands near the corner of Commons and Bayou streets — a modest survivor of a much larger story. Approach it knowing what you're looking at: not a grand monument, but the kind of plain, purpose-built structure that represented an enormous communal achievement.
As you stand in Refugio, try to picture the geography the marker describes — the corners where the earliest schools sat, the street where boys carried drinking water, the church that became a classroom after the fire. This is a story told in ordinary blocks of a small Texas town, and walking them is the best way to feel how close-knit and determined that effort had to be.
It makes a rewarding stop on a drive through the coastal bend, especially paired with Refugio's older Spanish and Mexican heritage. Come with a little patience and imagination; the reward of a marker like this is not spectacle but the quiet realization of how much was accomplished, and by whom, on a corner you might otherwise have passed without a second look.
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
- · A.T. Barefield
- · Julius Rosenwald
Themes & tags
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