County of site: Chariton County
Location of site: 4th St. (Gravel Rd.), ¼ miles W. of MO J, Dalton
4th St. from the cemetery to the school building is hidden under about 3 feet of heavy grass and weeds. The road itself is not visible. (I known I'm nuts to drive these places.) The roads does not bend to right as in Google maps satellite view, but has been plowed under and it ends at the school.
The Bartlett Bldg, the two NON-Contributing buildings exist, but in poor shape.
All other buildings were totally collapsed.
"When freedom came in 1865, most of the state’s slaves remained close to their masters’ land. Some stayed on as sharecroppers, sleeping in the same drafty shacks they’d lived in as slaves. Others formed communities and founded “free towns” in unwanted bottom land or migrated to nearby villages such as Dalton, where there was at least some work to be had.
"Hughes and his brothers trace their ancestors to dates carved into the surviving tombstones in the old black cemetery or written on the property deeds that have been handed down through the generations. If they bought land, most black Daltonites snatched up small plots in a meadow just over a hill from Main Street on the town’s north side, a bucolic niche of the world known as Dalton Hollow, or, more often, “the Holla.” Some even scraped together down payments for a few acres of farmland.
"For blacks in Little Dixie, most career options required a sturdy back. But in 1907, a college-educated African-American named Nathaniel C. Bruce arrived in Dalton with the vision of creating “the Tuskegee of the Midwest.” Bruce had studied under Booker T. Washington, the founder of that famous Alabama institution, who had written and lectured that blacks could achieve social and political power only through trained use of their muscles. “Our greatest danger,” Washington once declared, “is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may … fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor and put brains and skills into the common occupations of life.”
"Bruce acquired a barn and 8 acres next to Dalton and called his hay-loft classroom the Bartlett Agricultural and Industrial School. The first class — three boys and two girls — spent half its day hearing lectures or taking tests in the barn and the other half tilling the field.
"Within five years, the school had spread to two buildings and across 72 acres. Bruce and his students began claiming ribbons at statewide harvest-festival contests, and soon Bruce was crowing, “Place Missouri black boys on Missouri black land, behind the world-famed Missouri mule, and nothing can beat the combination for raising corn or other crops.”
"Whites even offered praise, albeit backhandedly. One newspaper hailed the school for “doing good work among the Negroes by training them [in] habits of industry.” But, the paper added, “so few of them who go to school ever amount to anything.”
"Buoyant with his school’s successes, Bruce ascended the ranks of Missouri’s education system, one of the only white-collar career tracks open to blacks in the early twentieth century. In 1924, he earned the title of State Inspector for Negro Schools. This job sent him to schoolhouses across the state, where he espoused his own peculiar interpretation of Washington’s philosophy. He urged blacks to take pride in “cooking, washing, ironing, scrubbing or driving nails” as opposed to “high book learning.”
"By then, blacks held a small amount of power in state politics. It was concentrated in Kansas City and St. Louis, which had bustling black communities. In an area like 18th and Vine, with its storefronts bearing signs for doctors and lawyers and insurance salesmen, Bruce’s call for enlightened servitude fell flat. His edicts left those communities “dazed and unbelieving and some of us angry and crying for blood,” columnist Roy Wilkins wrote in a 1926 editorial in the Kansas City Call. “We can’t get along without the higher book learning and the man who says so is either playing to a ‘cracker’ ‘hill billy’ gallery for a mess of pottage or he is woefully ignorant.”
"Within a year, Bruce was gone. But his school continued to prosper. The main classroom building stood two stories high, a sturdy cube of red brick and wide windows. Clustered around it were the principal’s cottage, a one-room cafeteria and separate quarters for the married teachers and the single faculty members. Sprinkled in between were barns, sheds and chicken coops.
"The school was separate and not quite equal. “There was no gym there,” says Eliot Battle, the school’s last principal. “The young men actually won the state championship one year while I was there, but they played their games out in the courtyard, out near the principal’s cottage.” State law prohibited blacks and whites from sharing classes. Statutes also forbade the establishment of black high schools in communities where there were few blacks, so the Dalton school was the only option for miles. It drew black students from a five-county area. Even today, Daltonites like to say, “They bused for segregation, and they bused again for desegregation.”
"By 1954, the year the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka ended state-sponsored segregation, Dalton had begun to lose population. The Depression years had hit Chariton County hard, and many of Dalton’s blacks had left for Kansas City. But the school had kept a clutch of people in town, and when it closed one year after the court’s momentous decision, only a few grandparents and black landowners stayed.
"The school’s closing was bittersweet, says Battle. “There were students, of course, who were sorry to see it come to an end. And there were people who lived in that area for all of their years who looked at Dalton School as being important to their community. But I was very pleased to see the school closed and see the students integrated into their own districts as they should have been earlier.”' ~ The Pitch