Center Point School
Pittsburg, Camp County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Center Point began as a Freedmen's community about 1865-70. The Willie Johnson family were the first settlers and were soon joined by other families. In 1899 G.W. Goulsby opened a one-room school, the first in the settlement; Pete Griffin was the first teacher. In 1916 a new five-room school was built. In later years campus additions, partly funded by the Julius Rosenwald Fund, included a teacherage, library, dormitories, cafeteria, and gymnasium. Students maintained a farm and garden and operated a cannery. Center Point School was closed in 1952. (1996)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Center Point grew up as a Freedmen's community in the years just after emancipation, settled by the Willie Johnson family and other formerly enslaved people around 1865–70. In 1899 G. W. Goulsby opened its first school in a single room, and over the following decades it expanded—aided by the Julius Rosenwald Fund—into a full campus with a library, dormitories, cafeteria, and gymnasium, where students ran a working farm and cannery. The school served the community until it closed in 1952.
Why it matters
Center Point School reflects how Black Texans built and sustained their own institutions of learning after slavery, often with Rosenwald Fund support, in the face of a segregated school system.
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Related people
- · Willie Johnson
- · G. W. Goulsby
- · Pete Griffin
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Center Point Community
Pittsburg, TX
In 1865, newly freed African Americans founded Center Point, building it into a self-reliant community anchored by the Center Point Baptist Church (1873) and the Industrial Union (chartered 1889), a cooperative that helped members buy farms and run a brick kiln, sawmill, and cotton gin. Its school, led by Mr. and Mrs. L. B. Cash, became a notable vocational campus whose 14 acres of buildings were largely erected by the students themselves, complete with a cooperative boarding plan. The school consolidated with Pittsburg in 1950.
Gilgal Baptist Church
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Founded in 1865 as the Civil War ended, this Black Baptist congregation began under a brush arbor and took the biblical name "Gilgal," the Israelites' first camp in the Promised Land — a fitting choice for a people newly freed. Over the following decades its members raised a frame church, ran a Black school on donated land, and, under Rev. W. L. Dickson, opened the Dickson Colored Orphans Home. The brick-veneered sanctuary and educational annex trace a congregation that steadily built institutions of faith, learning, and care.
Macedonia United Methodist Church
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After the Civil War and emancipation, freedpeople in western Marion County gathered under the leadership of Henry Smith and, on land belonging to a white settler named Leigh High, organized Macedonia Methodist Episcopal Church in April 1872. Within two years the congregation founded its own school, and over the following decades it built and rebuilt sanctuaries as fire, growth, and hard times demanded. A 1968 merger renewed the congregation, which endures as Macedonia United Methodist Church.
Pleasant Hill School
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Pleasant Hill is one of Texas's oldest African American communities, its Baptist church organized in 1843 beside the Old Monterey Road. In 1925 residents built this school with help from the Julius Rosenwald program, matching their own contributions to erect a Craftsman-detailed schoolhouse to a standard Rosenwald plan, complete with an industrial room and movable partition. It taught roughly 1,200 students through eighth grade until 1964 and, restored around 2009, is the last of the twenty-three Rosenwald schools once built in Cass County.