Site of Bartlett Colored School

🏛️The era

Bartlett grew up with the railroad. The town was founded in 1882 when the Missouri, Kansas & Texas line arrived, right on the county line between Bell and Williamson counties. By 1912 a second railway served the town, and Bartlett had become a busy shipping point for the cotton, grain, and livestock of the surrounding Blackland Prairie. Like many Texas farm towns of the time, it had real prosperity, and that prosperity was not shared equally.

This was the Jim Crow South. Texas law required separate schools for Black and white children, and in practice the Black schools almost always received less money, worse buildings, fewer grades, and less support. Rural Black families who did much of the farm labor on the prairie often lived far from any school, and a high school diploma could mean sending a child to another city.

Across the South, Black communities responded by organizing. Parents, churches, and teachers raised money, lobbied school boards, and built what they could with what they had. Teachers trained at Black colleges such as Prairie View A&M, the state's historically Black land-grant school, spread across Texas and often became the backbone of their communities' schools.

👥People & events

The school's beginnings show how Black education was treated. In 1909 the Bartlett Public School built a new brick schoolhouse for white students. The district then moved its old six-room frame classroom building to this site, and it became the town's first school for African American children. When that building burned in 1919, Dave Johnson was hired to build a new one-story, four-room schoolhouse from recycled lumber. In 1945 half of a building from the Goodeville School District was moved in as a shop and vocational agriculture building.

The principals who served here kept the school going through those decades. The marker names G. B. Blackburn (1909–1911), S. E. Cooper, whose service ran a remarkable thirty-four years from 1911 to 1945, and John R. Powell, Ph.D. (1945–1946). In the early years the school was unaccredited and only went through tenth grade. Few rural children could reach it, and fewer still could travel to Temple or Austin to finish high school.

The parents did not accept that. In 1933 they formed a parent-teacher association with the teachers and kept pushing for improvements. In 1946 that work drew a dedicated couple from Prairie View A&M: Gentry "Prof" Powell, Sr., and his wife, Marguerite C. Powell. Together they worked as principals, teachers, and coaches. At the start of the 1946–47 school year the district provided a school bus and driver, and the Powells used it to bring in children from the countryside.

The results came quickly. By the summer of 1947, attendance had doubled to more than 160 students, and the school had become an accredited twelve-grade system. Under Marguerite C. Powell, who served as principal from 1947 to 1965, it became a Class B accredited school, and in May 1949 it held its first graduation ceremony. New sports programs and a stronger curriculum followed, and that same year the school moved to a new location on Cryer Drive on the north side of town.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Bartlett Colored School is a small-town version of one of the central stories of twentieth-century America. Under segregation, Black communities were given cast-off buildings and second-class funding and told to make do. Over and over, they did much more than that. Parents organized, teachers sacrificed, and students reached for diplomas the system was not designed to give them.

The arrival of the Powells from Prairie View A&M shows how important historically Black colleges were in this period. They trained the teachers and principals who staffed Black schools across the South, and those educators often served as community leaders as well. Their work built the education, the confidence, and the networks that later fed the civil rights movement.

Within a few years of the Bartlett school's first graduation, the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared segregated public schools unconstitutional, although integration came slowly in many places. Schools like this one show what Black communities achieved before that ruling, under conditions designed to hold them back.

🧭If you visit

This marker identifies the site where the Bartlett Colored School stood. The frame buildings described in its history are gone, so you are visiting a place of memory rather than an intact historic schoolhouse. Stand near the marker and picture the six-room building moved here in 1909, the four-room schoolhouse built from recycled lumber after the 1919 fire, and the shop building hauled in from Goodeville.

Bartlett itself is worth a slow walk. Its railroad-era downtown recalls the years when the town shipped the region's farm products. Remember that the town's economy depended on the work of the families whose children studied here.

The town is an easy detour on a drive through the Blackland Prairie between the Austin and Temple areas, the same cities students once had to reach to finish school. As you leave, think of the school bus that started running in 1946, bringing country children to a school that their parents and teachers had built into something to be proud of.