Franklinton Christian College, one of several educational institutions for African Americans in Franklinton during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, uplifted the students who attended it. The school and its antecedents operated from the 1870s until it closed in 1930 — a victim of the Great Depression.

According to J. Stanley Taylor’s A History of Black Congregational Christian Churches of the South (United Church Press for the American Missionary Association, 1978), a school for African American children was begun as early as 1871 in a black Christian church in Franklinton. Its teachers worked day and night to teach men, women, and children how to read and write. During the 1870s, the North Carolina Colored Christian Conference raised funds for a school, and a lot on the south side of Franklinton, between Main Street and the tracks of the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad, was purchased. Henry E. Long operated a high school in the Franklinton Christian Church until 1880, when a school building was completed on the lot that had been acquired.

The mission board of the American Christian Convention in the fall of 1880 sent the Rev. George Young, a white minister from New York, to head the school in Franklinton. Appeals printed in the Herald of Gospel Liberty, a newspaper published by the Christian Church, supported the work of the school, which was described by a northern donor who visited the institution in February 1883:

The building is a frame structure, 50 by 30 feet, two stories and dormitory on third floor, with cupola and bell. It has quite an imposing appearance. On the first floor is Brush Hall, which, besides its school purposes, is used as a chapel for religious Services.…The second story, besides the passage, has two halls and a class room and library room. But the dormitory is not finished, and the whole interior needs a coat of paint...

The school also included a cottage for the principal and the Gaylord Boarding Hall, which was located on a lot north of the school lot. Also fifty by thirty feet, it contained two floors and a finished attic.

Incorporated in 1883 as the Franklinton Literary and Theological Christian Institute, the school was described by another observer that year as “no longer an experiment. A fine location, suitable buildings, and three years of school, in which there has been …an increasing interest and a permanent growth in numbers, have placed Franklinton permanently among the institutions that be. The work has been excellent, equal to that of any institution of its character and advantages.” Here young children and parents as old as forty-five learned together, at little or no cost. Students in the theological class trained to be ministers.

The school continued to develop. In 1891 the North Carolina General Assembly ratified an act to incorporate it as the Franklinton Christian College. The legislation gave the American Christian Convention the authority to fill vacancies in the board of trustees. A catalog published by the school in 1899 listed the Rev. Z. A. Poste as president. The institution served a wide range of age groups, from those in the Kindergarten Department to students enrolled in courses in higher mathematics, Latin, natural sciences, and mental and moral philosophy. By the time the 1908-09 catalog was published, the Rev. Henry E. Long was serving as president. Three years of “solid work” in the college’s Scientific Course qualified students for positions as teachers in “schools of high grade.” Others received training in domestic science and the printing trade. Still others were prepared for the ministry or to engage in mission work. At this time, some 130 males and females from North Carolina and Virginia were enrolled at the college.

Around 1905 the college moved to an eighty-three-acre site approximately one mile north of Franklinton, on the Seaboard Air Line Railway and U.S. Route 1. New buildings were constructed there, but the Great Depression forced the school’s closure in 1930. Today, the United Church of Christ’s conference and retreat center at the site of the former Bricks School near Whitakers is named the Franklinton Center at Bricks in recognition of Franklinton Christian College’s important role in educating African Americans.

Published in The Franklin Times on May 25, 2017.

Maury York is director of the Tar River Center for History and Culture at Louisburg College.