Browse Items · Omeka at Auburn

Auburn Masonic Female College

In the early 1850s, Colonel Nathaniel Scott petitioned Auburn’s local Masonic lodge (Auburn Lodge #76) to sponsor a female educational center in town. In 1853, Auburn Masonic Female College became the town’s first women’s educational institution.…

Tags: Auburn, Education, Lee County, National Register of Historic Places

Auburn Female Institute

Auburn’s first post-Civil War public school, possibly founded as early as 1870, was actually a women’s school. Auburn Female Institute was located on Tichenor Avenue. Under Principal George W. Duncan, Auburn Female Institute offered instruction in…

Tags: Auburn, Education, Lee County

Auburn Public School

In 1899, Auburn Mayor Charles Little and the town council appropriated bonds of $6,000 to build a large public schoolhouse. The 74x58 ½ foot building included a 40x70 foot auditorium on the top floor. Amenities included wood and coal pot-bellied…

Lee County High School

In 1914, the city of Auburn successfully petitioned the Lee County Board of Education to strip Opelika’s high school of the title “Lee County High School” and bequeath that distinction to a new high school in Auburn. Auburn provided seven acres for…

Gold Hill School

Located in northwestern Lee County, the Gold Hill community coalesced during the mid-1830s. Originally located in Chambers County, the settlement fell within Lee County’s boundaries after its 1866 inception. Resident Nathaniel Robertson donated land…

Opelika Male School and Opelika Female Academy

After Opelika’s 1854 town incorporation, citizens concerned with the educational prospects of the hamlet’s youth opened several private academies. Two of the early private schools were the Opelika Male School and the Opelika Female Academy, both…

Opelika Baptist Female College

Opelika Baptist Church established a school in 1873. Local members of the denomination opened the Baptist Female College inside Opelika Baptist Church and named Professor J.J. Langham as principal. It later moved to a new two-story brick building…

Beulah High School

Under the management of Professor Franklin Little, Beulah Academy opened its doors in November 1894. In 1928, the Lee County Board of Education passed a motion to erect a consolidated first through twelfth grade school in Beulah. Beulah Academy, Pine…

Wittel Dormitory

Located at 205 South Gay Street, Wittel Dormitory represents an example of the colonial revival architectural style. Built in the early 1900s as the private residence of Samuel S. Wittel, the building first served as a boarding facility for…

Trinity Male and Female High Schools

One of Lee County’s first academic institutions opened in the now-defunct community of Browneville in 1837. The school lay four miles south of the modern-day unincorporated community of Salem, AL, near Marshall’s Hill. James McGreen founded the…

Union Grove School

Formerly the lone educational institution in the community of Chewacla, this tiny log cabin Christian school was built around 1840 run for two years by the Reverend William M. Mitchell. The one-room facility was located near the Methodist church on…

Beauregard High School

In 1923, several rural one-room schools (including Whatley, Thompson, Hopewell, Hinson, Parker’s Crossroads, and Dorsey schools) in the vicinity of present-day Beauregard, AL consolidated to form the Whatley School. The school at Parker’s Crossroads…

Loachapoka Academy

John Fletcher Yarborough established this one-room educational facility in 1854. He became the school’s first principal, while his wife, America Walton Leftwich, taught music. Contemporary Loachapoka High School resides on the site of the old…

Pepperell Village School

A factory community appeared after the opening of Pepperell Manufacturing Company’s Opelika textile mill in 1925. A school founded in the new neighborhood under the aegis of the county school system served the first- through sixth-grade students of…

Little Zion School

Formerly located 4.5 miles south of Opelika on Highway 51, Little Zion School serviced Lee County African-American students starting around the turn of the century. Gladys Owens, a teacher from Tuskegee, commuted to Little Zion School to teach…

Mount Moriah School

Located on Wrights Mill Road in close proximity to the entrance of Chewacla State Park, the Mount Moriah Rosenwald School was founded in or around 1932. The one-room school functioned for around thirty years, until the Lee County Board of Education…

Lee County Training School

One of the largest Rosenwald schools erected in Alabama, the ten-room Lee County Training School served first- through twelfth-grade African-American students in the Auburn area starting in 1928. Lee County Training School became the first black…

Tags: African American Schools, Auburn AL, Clarence Jackson, Education, Great Depression, J.F. Drake High School, Julius Rosenwald, Lamar Player, Lee County AL, Lee County Training School, Martin Luther King Jr. Park Auburn Alabama, Rosenwald Schools

Frog Pond School

Frog Pond School, also known as Jones Academy, was on Lee County Road 279 near the intersection with Lee County Road 259. Professors S.J. Holder and J.H. Bradshaw instructed students at Frog Pond around the turn of the twentieth century. Frog Pond…

Botsford School

Founded in 1923 near the intersection of Highway 280 and Lee County Road 147, pot-bellied stoves heated this three-room school. This facility, located near the Farmville community, served students from the first to the seventh grades. Former student…

Mount Sinai School

Adjacent to Mount Sinai Church, Mount Sinai School catered to Farmville’s African-American schoolchildren. Housed in a two-story building, the school operated from 1913 until some undisclosed date during the 1940s. Janie Jones of Opelika taught at…

Pine Grove Academy

Located near Beulah, Pine Grove Academy was founded in the 1870s, next to the land that K.L. Wallace donated to the Methodist church on Lee County Road 262. The school has succumbed to the ravages of time, but the original church site still exists,…

Smith's Station School

This academic institute, one of the county’s oldest, started out as a log cabin in 1826, near where Smith’s Station Elementary School currently stands. This school never had more than thirty students. Much like the consolidations in the Beulah and…

J.F. Drake High School

Auburn’s last exclusively African-American public high school was founded in 1957. J.F. Drake High School was named after Dr. Joseph Fanning Drake, and Auburn native who went on to become the president of Alabama A&M College in Huntsville. In 1968,…

Tags: African American, Auburn, Education, Lee County

Auburn High School

In 1931, the institution that would come to be known as Auburn High School opened on Samford Avenue at the site of present-day Samford Middle School. From 1931 to 1959, the institution was known as Lee County High School. Until 1966, the entire…

Auburn Junior High School

From 1931 to 1966, Auburn’s white middle (and elementary) school students operated under the aegis of Auburn High School at 332 East Samford Avenue. During this period, the sub-institution was known as Auburn Grammar School. When Auburn High School…

Tags: Auburn, Education, Lee County

Boykin Street Elementary School

Auburn's first public elementary school that serviced only African-American students was founded in 1951, when it also briefly functioned as a junior high school. Boykin Street Elementary remained the institution for Auburn’s African-American grammar…

Tags: African American, Auburn, Education, Lee County

Luther N. Duncan Hall

The three-story Georgian-style building located at 322 Mell Street was erected in 1928 for the sole purpose of housing Alabama Polytechnic Institute’s Agricultural Extension Program, the capacity in which in still serves today. Named after Luther N.…

The Old Rotation

Located on Lem Morrison Drive directly across the street from the Auburn University Parking Services Building, The Old Rotation exemplifies Auburn’s tradition as a bastion of agricultural education. Professor J.F. Duggar established the acre in 1896…

Lee-Scott Academy

Presbyterian Day School, a private academy, was founded in Auburn in 1965 and was renamed Lee Academy several years later. In 1970, a contingent of white Opelikans, displeased with pending implementation of the court-mandated integration of the city…

Opelika Public School

On November 23, 1869, Opelika citizens petitioned the City Council to create a public high school. A Board of Trustees formed, and in 1873 the Alabama State Legislature empowered the city government to collect taxes to subsidize public education. The…

Opelika High School 1911-1918

In 1911, the Alabama State Legislature allocated a disbursement to fund a public high school in every county in the state. Opelika solicited private funds to meet the state in the middle, and Lee County’s first stand-alone high school, Opelika High…

Henry G. Clift High School

In 1918, Henry G. Clift High School opened on the site of the old Opelika High School on the corner of North Eighth Street and Seventh Avenue. Opelika’s city council moved to name the new high school after the town’s mayor. Contractor W.J. Padgett…

Opelika Middle School

In 1959, Henry G. Clift High School relocated to a new facility at 1206 Denson Drive and rechristened itself Opelika High School, the institutional name it bore from 1911 to 1918. U.S. District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson gave the Opelika city…

Opelika High School, 1972-Present

In 1969, U.S. District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson ordered the Opelika to desegregate its school system. Observing that African Americans comprised 30 percent of the students enrolled in Opelika city schools, Johnson demanded that all of Opelika’s…

J.W. Darden High School

Founded in 1951, J.W. Darden High School took on the ninth and tenth grade students of East Street High School and added eleventh and twelfth grade curricula. Darden was Opelika’s African-American high school until the city’s high schools integrated…

East Street High School

Between 1910 and 1912, the city of Opelika erected the Opelika Colored School, the town’s first black public school. The school was located on East Street and housed ten classrooms. The school catered to students from the first to the tenth grade,…

Auburn Rosenwald Public School

In March 1915, a group of concerned Auburn citizens held a fund-raising rally at Ebenezer Baptist Church aimed at financing a school for the town’s African-American children. In attendance were over three hundred African Americans and about a hundred…

Loachapoka Rosenwald School

In the spring of 1913, Loachapoka became the site of the first of over 5,300 rural black schools in the United States subsidized by Sears CEO Julius Rosenwald. Rosenwald, who grew up destitute, wanted to provide African Americans living in the South…