Piney Woods: The School Built on a Dime and a Vision

In the spring of nineteen nine, Laurence C. Jones arrived in Rankin County, Mississippi with almost no money in his pocket and a degree from the University of Iowa. He was in his twenties, Black, and determined to start a school for Black children in the rural South. He found a clearing in the pine woods south of Jackson, gathered a group of children around a tree stump, and began teaching.

The Piney Woods Country Life School grew from that stump into a fully accredited boarding school that has operated continuously for more than a century. Jones raised money by traveling nationally, speaking to anyone who would listen, and by writing appeals that reached donors from across the country. He adopted the principle that the school should be self-supporting: students grew food, raised livestock, built buildings, and learned trades alongside their academic studies. The model drew on Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee approach and extended it into the Mississippi pine belt, one of the poorest regions in the United States.

The school survived because of the extraordinary stubbornness of its founder. In nineteen eighteen, a white mob accused Jones of inciting Black laborers to leave the area. He was nearly lynched. By his own account he talked the mob down, and afterward he continued raising money for the school with his usual determination. In nineteen fifty-four he appeared on the television program This Is Your Life, which generated national attention and a surge of donations that stabilized the school's finances.

Piney Woods still operates today as a residential school serving low-income students from across Mississippi and beyond. It charges minimal tuition and covers the gap through fundraising, just as it has since nineteen nine. The stump where Laurence Jones held his first class is no longer there. The school that grew from it is.