Montopolis Negro School

A storm destroyed the original Montopolis Negro School in 1935, along with several of the county's white schools. St. Edward's Baptist Church secured a surplus army barracks building as a replacement and deeded the land on Montopolis Drive to Travis County for school purposes. Local tradition says the barracks came from Camp Swift, but the building's National Register nomination points out that Camp Swift did not exist until 1942, so where it actually came from remains an open question. It opened as a one room schoolhouse. Travis County ran forty two segregated rural schools for Black children at a time when Austin's own schools would not enrol them. A second classroom and a lunchroom were added in 1952, the year the county handed the school to the Austin district after annexation. It closed in 1962 as desegregation reached the district, and it is one of the last of those buildings still standing. It served as the neighbourhood's community centre as much as its school. The building passed into private hands, and a developer bought it in 2015. In January 2019 a panel of special commissioners approved the city's taking of it by eminent domain at four hundred and sixty four thousand dollars, after a campaign led by the activists Suzana Almanza and Fred L. McGhee. The developer appealed, and in 2022 a jury ordered the city to pay just over nine hundred and eighty three thousand instead. The city has held it since, working through a vision and interpretive plan with the neighbourhood rather than opening it. It is not a museum, and it opens only for occasional community events. What it is instead is a surviving piece of the arrangement by which a county educated the children a city had refused, in a barracks built for soldiers.