Eddie Mae Herron Center: One Room, Two Hundred Years of Memory

Inside a small frame building in Pocahontas that once served as both a church and a segregated school, nearly two hundred years of African American life in Randolph County, Arkansas is preserved in photographs, documents, and remembered voices.

The building was constructed in nineteen eighteen as Saint Mary's African Methodist Episcopal Church and doubled as the Pocahontas Colored School. Eddie Mae Herron was its sole teacher for much of the school's existence from nineteen forty-eight to nineteen sixty-five, teaching every grade in a single room. The center bearing her name was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand two. In northeast Arkansas, where Black history has been systematically underdocumented, the Eddie Mae Herron Center is one of the few institutions keeping that record intact.