82-Year-Old School For Blacks Makes History

Freetown Elementary was a two-room schoolhouse when it opened in 1925, funded partly by a philanthropist who sought to provide schools to blacks when segregation and discrimination were standard practice.



It had no indoor plumbing, so students had to use outhouses. They had to run into the woods to cut wood for the stove to heat the building whenever the coal ran out. And because black children didn't get school buses, some students had to walk several miles.



These were hard times, but former students remember them fondly. They swell with pride over their former school's placement was placed last month on the National Register of Historic Places.



The designation means that the National Park Service recognizes the building as an important part of state history, said Nancy Kurtz, the National Register coordinator for the Maryland Historical Trust.

Source: The Baltimore Sun