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.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When the Civil War ended and emancipation reached Texas in 1865, formerly enslaved people across the state faced enormous questions at once: where to live, how to make a living, and how to hold on to the freedom they had just won. In East Texas, a region of cotton farms where slavery had been deeply rooted, many freedpeople came together in their own rural settlements, often called Freedmen's communities. Center Point, in what is now Camp County, began as one of them in the years right after the war.
Schooling was one of freedom's most urgent priorities. Under slavery, literacy had been withheld and often forbidden. In freedom, Black families across the South worked hard to build schools, often with their own money and labor, while public education in Texas remained strictly segregated and Black schools were badly underfunded.
In the early twentieth century, help for some of these communities came from the Julius Rosenwald Fund. The fund was established by the Sears, Roebuck executive Julius Rosenwald, and it worked with the educator Booker T. Washington's circle to provide matching grants for rural Black schools across the South. Communities had to raise money and contribute themselves, so every Rosenwald building was also a monument to local effort.
People & events
The marker names the Willie Johnson family as the first to settle Center Point. Other families soon joined them, and they built a community of their own where there had been none. We don't have the details of their daily lives, but the outline is clear: a group of people newly free chose to settle together, farm and build.
In 1899 G. W. Goulsby opened a one-room school, the first in the settlement, and Pete Griffin became its first teacher. By then the community had already existed for about a generation. That suggests a settlement mature enough to put its resources behind its children's education.
The school then grew steadily. In 1916 a new five-room building replaced the single room. In the years that followed, with partial funding from the Rosenwald Fund, the campus added a teacherage (housing for teachers), a library, dormitories, a cafeteria and a gymnasium. The dormitories suggest that Center Point served students from beyond walking distance. Students also kept a farm and garden and ran a cannery. That was practical education: it taught agricultural skills and helped feed the school community. The school closed in 1952, after roughly half a century of teaching.
Its place in the American story
Center Point School is a local chapter in one of the great untold stories of American education: how Black Southerners, shut out of equal public schooling, built their own institutions. Schools like this one were often the center of rural Black community life. They were places for learning and gathering, and they carried hope for the next generation.
The Rosenwald connection links Center Point to a regional movement. The Rosenwald Fund helped build thousands of schools and related buildings across the South in the early twentieth century, and it required local communities to raise part of the cost. Its legacy is a partnership between philanthropy and the sacrifices of the Black families who raised matching funds, donated land and gave their labor.
The school closed in 1952, two years before the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision declared segregated public schools unconstitutional. Center Point reminds us how much Black communities accomplished within an unjust system, and what was at stake as that system was challenged.
If you visit
The marker is near Pittsburg in Camp County, in the rolling, wooded farm country of Northeast Texas. Take in the rural setting. The quiet roads and open fields help you picture a community where families farmed, children walked or boarded to reach school, and students tended gardens and put up food in the cannery.
Think of the marker as a window into a whole community, not just a single building. As you stand there, try to picture how the campus grew over the decades, from one room in 1899 to a five-room school and then to a campus with a library, dormitories, cafeteria and gym.
Camp County is small and easy to explore on a day trip through East Texas. Combine this stop with time in nearby Pittsburg and other historic markers in the area. If you're tracing African American history in Texas, Center Point is a meaningful stop on a wider journey through the region's Freedmen's communities and Rosenwald school sites.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
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
Gilmer, TX
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
Jefferson, TX
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
Linden, TX
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.