By Jonathan Baird

Common Soil America

You can learn a great deal about a community by reading its historical markers.

You can learn just as much by noticing what was never marked.

Around Carroll County, we have signs recognizing prominent buildings, military events, public officials, and other pieces of local history. Those stories deserve to be remembered. But they are not the whole story.

Scattered across this county were schools where generations of Black children learned to read, formed friendships, played ball, sang in choirs, and prepared themselves for lives beyond the boundaries segregation had placed around them.

Some of those buildings burned. Some were demolished. Some disappeared after consolidation. In other cases, the physical place may be gone while the road, neighborhood, or family memory remains.

And sometimes the records themselves were discarded.

That distinction matters. Not every missing building was deliberately destroyed to erase Black history. Time, weather, fire, changing school systems, and development have taken many historic places from all of us.

But when buildings disappear, records are thrown away, and public accounts rarely mention what once stood there, the result is still a kind of erasure. The history becomes harder to find, easier to overlook, and eventually dependent upon the memories of people who are no longer young.

Schools built by the community

During segregation, Black children in Carroll County did not have access to the same schools, transportation, books, or public investment available to white children.

In McKenzie, formal education for Black children began in a church building in 1898. The first public school was known as Booker T. Washington School. It began as a one-room schoolhouse and was enlarged through the efforts of students’ parents.

In 1924, Principal James L. Seets sought assistance from the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Black residents raised money that was matched through the Rosenwald program, leading to a larger school that became Carroll County’s only high school for African American students. As enrollment grew, the community raised another $4,000 for expansion. John L. Webb, a Black resident, made the largest individual contribution, and the school was eventually named in his honor.

Source: Tennessee Historical Commission’s Webb School National Register nomination

That history changes how we should describe these schools.

They were not simply gifts handed to Black communities. Black families helped pay for them, build them, support them, and keep them operating—while also paying taxes into a segregated public system that routinely provided better resources to white schools.

The Rosenwald program helped construct nearly 5,000 schools across the rural South. Communities receiving assistance were required to contribute money, labor, materials, or land. Those contributions demonstrated how deeply Black families valued education, even when the larger system denied their children equal treatment.

Source: Library of Congress guide to Rosenwald schools

Carroll County was part of that larger story.

Fisk University’s Rosenwald archives contain surviving records and photographs for schools identified as Huntingdon School, McKenzie Rosenwald School, Hollow Rock School, Wingo School, and County Training School—also associated in the archive with Buena Vista. These are more than old names on index cards. They are evidence of a Black educational network that once stretched across the county.

Source: Fisk University Rosenwald Fund Collection

The places that disappeared

A locally compiled history of Hale Junior High School in Huntingdon records the names of numerous Black community schools, including Barker, Buena Vista, Clarksburg, Dunbar, Hollow Rock, Morning Sun, Mount Olive, Rosser, St. Paul, Wingo, Smyrna, and others.

Hale itself was built with Rosenwald assistance. According to the surviving building record, Black residents contributed $700, the Rosenwald Fund contributed $900, and public funding supplied $2,850. The recorded white private contribution was zero.

Students at Hale reportedly learned from books passed down by white schools. After completing the ninth grade, many continued their education at Webb School in McKenzie.

The original Hale building was damaged by fire, destroying school records with it. A later brick building was destroyed by a tornado in 1971. Today, Hale and Cox Streets remain as physical reminders of Black educators and the community that once surrounded the school.

Source: Compiled history of Hale Junior High School

A street name is a marker, but only if someone knows the story behind it.

Without that story, it becomes another name we pass without thinking.

What was thrown away

Webb School provides the clearest example of both loss and resistance.

The school’s earlier building was destroyed by a fire of undetermined origin in 1936. Classes continued in the McKenzie Masonic Hall, and graduation was held at Enon Baptist Church. A replacement campus later occupied the former McTyeire College property.

In 1958, a new Webb School was constructed. It served students in grades one through twelve and remained Carroll County’s only public high school for Black students during the final years of segregation.

Webb closed as a segregated school in 1966.

What happened next deserves to be stated plainly.

According to the school’s National Register documentation, important school documents were disposed of while the building was being cleaned out after desegregation. Much of Webb’s recorded history was thrown away.

Former students attempted to save what they could.

Whether the people discarding those papers thought of their actions as historical erasure, routine cleanup, or something else cannot be proven from the available record. But their intentions do not change what was nearly lost: photographs, school documents, evidence of achievement, and pieces of thousands of individual lives.

The alumni understood the value of what remained.

They formed the Webb Alumni Association, gathered saved documents and artifacts, and established a museum. They organized chapters across the country and raised enough money to purchase their former school from the county.

In 2024, Webb School was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

The building survived because the people whose history it represented refused to surrender it.

Absence is not proof that nothing happened

This is where local history can mislead us.

When we see an old building, a preserved photograph, or a roadside marker, we recognize that something important happened there. When none of those things remain, it is easy to assume there is no story to tell.

But an empty lot does not mean an empty past.

A school may be gone while its students are still living. A church may have changed names while families remember the funerals, weddings, meetings, and organizing that took place inside it. A road may cross land where a Black community once gathered, even if no sign tells us to slow down and look.

Black history in rural America does not exist only in famous civil rights sites or major cities. It is present in our small towns, country churches, cemeteries, classrooms, family albums, and the memories carried around kitchen tables.

It is here in Carroll County.

What preservation requires from us

Preserving this history does not require us to accuse every person who came before us of the worst possible motive.

It does require honesty.

Segregation was not an abstract national policy. It shaped where local children could attend school, which books they received, how far they traveled, and how much their communities had to sacrifice for facilities that should have been provided equally.

We can acknowledge that truth without dismissing everything good about rural life. In fact, I believe caring about a place means being willing to tell its whole story.

That includes the Black families who raised money for schools.

It includes the educators who taught with used books and limited resources.

It includes students who went on to build lives and careers because their teachers prepared them well.

It also includes the documents that were discarded, the buildings that disappeared, and the memories we are in danger of losing.

Common Soil America exists for stories like this—not to speak over the people who lived them, but to listen while they are still here to tell us.

The next historical marker may not begin as a metal sign beside the road.

It may begin with someone opening an old box of photographs.

It may begin with a former student pointing toward an empty piece of ground and saying, “That is where our school stood.”

Our responsibility is to stop, listen, and make sure the story does not disappear again.