School built for African-American Students closed in 1989

St. Matthew High School, Melrose Louisiana

Date added: March 07, 2024 Categories:

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St. Matthew High School was the first public high school building constructed for African-Americans in lower Natchitoches Parish. Its opening in 1952 was a "coming of age" in public secondary education for blacks living in the Cane River plantation country, both in real and psychological terms. At that time it was one of only two public senior high schools for African-Americans in the parish. (The other was Central High School, some twenty-five miles away in the parish seat of Natchitoches.)

In the post-Reconstruction years, with Democrats back in control of the state, the rallying cry of the conservative political establishment was retrenchment. And with rigid segregation, the miserly appropriation had to fund a dual educational system. The end result was shameful for both races, but, of course, more so for African-Americans. The situation was at its worst in rural areas (for example, the plantation country of the lower Cane River).

Doggedly determined that their children would have an education no matter what, blacks often relied upon their own resources, small as they were. What typically developed was a "public" school that was and wasn't. Actually, it was a public-private effort with blacks providing a building and the school board providing some funding, perhaps for a teacher and some supplies. (The arrangement varied from place to place.) The building was space in a lodge or benevolent association hall, or more likely, a church. As T. H. Harris, State Superintendent of Education from 1908-1940, observed: "In most cases Negro churches were used for schoolhouses and the only equipment in these churches were the benches used for church services."

African-American churches (Protestant) doubling as schools were pervasive in rural Louisiana in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They remained the sole source of public education in some rural areas of the state into the 1940s. Instruction was not religious - there just happened to be "public" school held in a church, or sometimes in a one-room schoolhouse on church property. And while public funding for black education increased in the early twentieth century, it remained most definitely a separate but unequal system. In the first three decades of the twentieth century public education for whites improved dramatically as "modern brick schools" were built in town after town. But such fine facilities were largely unknown to blacks.

Private sources help to fill the gap between inadequate public funding and the great need. Chief among them was the Rosenwald Fund, which helped to erect 372 rural schoolhouses in Louisiana between 1916 and 1929. (One in four rural black schools was a Rosenwald school.) In South Louisiana, the Catholic Church provided parochial schools, as it did in Natchitoches Parish, a French Catholic enclave in an otherwise Anglo-Saxon Protestant region.

A combination of philanthropies in the early twentieth century addressed secondary education through what were called parish training schools. But here the emphasis was generally upon industrial/agricultural education rather than the classic academic high school curriculum. In the 1920s full-fledged high schools were limited to a handful of good size cities (4-5). While a study of the growth of African-American public high schools has yet to be done, research to date suggests that many parishes (counties) received their first public high schools for blacks in the 1940s.

With 1,264 square miles, Natchitoches is among Louisiana's largest parishes. It runs roughly 40-45 miles in a north-south direction and is some 30 miles at its widest (east-west) point. Cane River (actually an oxbow of the Red River) meanders through the parish, beginning in the parish seat of Natchitoches and continuing through the rich plantation country to the south. Because of plantation settlement patterns in the antebellum period and a notable free people of color population, the parish had (and has) a large African-American population, 45% of the total population in 1950.

St. Matthew's is located in the heart of the Cane River plantation country, some three miles from Melrose Plantation and the small community of the same name. Its pupils in the early days were what long-time principal Noble Butler aptly referred to as "plantation children." Parents worked the cotton fields (typically on land owned by someone else), as did the students themselves. Mr. Butler recalls the school year (even as late as the 1950s) being interrupted by the cycle of cotton.

St. Matthew's history has been pieced together from school board minutes and interviews with former students and Mr. Butler, the principal from 1947 to 1972. The school traces its origins to a "church school" established at St. Matthew (Baptist) Church in 1916. The teacher was Percy Brunson, who is considered the school's "founding father." He was paid $25 a month from public school funds.

The first mention of St. Matthew in Natchitoches Parish school board minutes is November 1^st, 1938, when the following deed was accepted: "From the Board of Deacons of the 3^rd Baptist St. Matthew Church, 4 acre more or less, on which will be erected a negro school building known as the St. Matthew School, consideration of which will be $1.00." On July 3^rd, 1939, the school board accepted a bid for the construction of a three-room wood frame school for St. Matthew. When Noble Butler arrived in January 1947, classes were being held in the three room school, the church, and a farm house a local man allowed them to use.

In the very beginning St. Matthew's was an elementary school. By 1944, per an extant school play program, it is being referred to as "St. Matthew Junior High," with reference to freshmen, sophomores and juniors. To graduate from high school, a student had to transfer to Central High in the parish seat of Natchitoches (about 25 miles away). A milestone in St. Matthew's history was the school board's October 4^th, 1947 approval of the school as "a senior high school effective beginning of the school session 1947-48." Noble Butler clearly recalls the campaign, in 1947, to secure this status from the school board. He had to have 100 names of potential students on a petition, which he secured by visiting young people in the cotton fields.

Now all twelve grades were available to young people of color in the area. One could graduate from high school. To accommodate anticipated increased enrollment, the school board approved money for construction materials to expand the school. Noble Butler, also a carpenter, headed the local volunteer construction crew which added four rooms to the original three room school on a tight schedule the summer of 1947. The expanded status and physical plant is reflected in soaring enrollment figures and increased number of teachers. For the 1946-47 school year, six teachers were instructing 185 students. By 1949-50, there were ten teachers and 304 students.

Undoubtedly increased enrollment led to the construction of St. Matthew's, a "modern brick school" to house the high school. Former student James W. Anthony remembers the school being so crowded that the class taught by the principal, civics, met in the principal's office. School board minutes do not indicate when the new purpose-built high school was initially approved, but by March 7^th, 1950, Peyton and Bosworth of Shreveport had been chosen as the architect. The construction was "substantially complete" by December 4^th, 1951, at which time the School Board officially accepted the building. It appears that the new school was not occupied until mid-1952. This large expansion of the St. Matthew physical plant is clearly reflected in enrollment figures and numbers of teachers, from 304 students and 10 teachers in 1949-50 to 566 students and eighteen teachers in 1952-53. The small school that began in a church some 30 to 40 years earlier had "truly arrived."

In a six-year period in the late forties and early fifties, the number of teachers and students tripled. This was possible, of course, because of the expansion of the physical plant, first with the four-room addition in 1947, and culminating with the erection of St. Matthew 1951-52. None of the earlier construction on the campus survives, leaving the brick high school to tell the story of rapid educational advancement for people of color along the lower Cane River. (The frame three-room school expanded in 1947 is long gone. A church survives on adjacent property, but it is a later structure, not the one where school was held.)

When asked to explain how people associated with St. Matthew felt about the erection of the new school, Noble Butler replied that it "meant everything." He felt that the school board's investment of public dollars to provide a first-class modern brick school to local African-Americans (the type whites already had) lent "credibility." In his opinion, the attitude toward the school changed with the new high school; there was increased pride; an attitude of "we've made it," so-to-speak. Mr. Butler recalls one "sour note." He and the faculty were anxious for everything in their new school to be new (rather than the all-too-often cast-me-downs from white schools). Some were disappointed when the chairs were old ones recycled from white schools. Mr. Butler recalls telling teachers, "Seats don't handicap learning."

St. Matthew was the only senior high school for people of color in the plantation country of the lower Cane River. Local Catholic youth went there as well because the parochial school (St. Joseph's) did not offer high school grades. Former students recall how they referred to their alma mater as "the university" (meaning that it was a first-class educational institution). They also fondly remember legendary educators/administrators such as Myra Friedman and Noble Butler. Mr. Butler's equally legendary motto was "Look sharp. Be sharp. Stay sharp."

St. Matthew continued in operation as a high school until 1989. In 2003, the Natchitoches Parish School board donated the property to the newly formed St. Matthew School Community Association, Inc. The association is in the process of finding funding sources, with the goal of restoring the school for use as a community center. To date, a feasibility study has been conducted and the group has received a $20,000 grant from the Cane River National Heritage Area.

Building Description

St. Matthew High School consists of a one-story classroom section and a noticeably taller auditorium/gymnasium at the rear center. It is located in a rural setting some three miles or so from Melrose Plantation and the rural community of the same name. The "no style" facility is of concrete block construction finished in plaster. There are a few brick veneer accents. Other than deterioration (some notable), the school looks as it did upon opening in 1952.

The long low-slung classroom section (which parallels Hwy. 119) is punctuated at the middle with a taller pavilion containing the lobby, principal's office and teachers lounge. Rising behind the central pavilion is a massive (some 5,500 square feet) auditorium/gym. At the rear of the auditorium is a one-story shop wing added in the mid-1950s. All of the foregoing elements have flat roofs. Between the auditorium/gym and the classroom wing, on each side, is a shed roofed section containing restrooms and changing facilities. The shed roofed units do not extend all the way to the front of the school. An inward sloping overhang, supported on angular concrete posts, marks the front entrance. Secondary entrances are set at the end of each side of the classroom wing within brick-faced recesses.

The school has six large classrooms with copious steel frame windows. The central window panel opens outward, pivoting from the top. Three tall multi-pane steel windows pierce each side elevation of the auditorium/gym. The interiors are quite plain. Walls are painted concrete block. Floors are asbestos tiles. At the back end of the auditorium/gym is a simple opening for a stage. The ceiling structure in the classroom section is presently exposed. The original sheathing was removed due to extensive damage.

St. Matthew has been vacant since 1989, and deterioration has taken its toll. There is one instance of severe deterioration - the southern most classroom (at the end of the classroom wing). Here the roof is completely gone and the top parts of the walls are damaged.