Sedalia: Charlotte Hawkins Brown's School in the Fields

Sedalia is a small Guilford County community, but what was built here in nineteen oh two belongs on any list of the most consequential schools in the American South. Charlotte Hawkins Brown was only eighteen years old when she came to this rural community to teach at a one-room school in an old blacksmith shed. Her northern funding fell through. She refused to leave. Instead she traveled north to raise money from philanthropists, named her new institution the Palmer Memorial Institute after a mentor, Alice Freeman Palmer, and began building a campus on two hundred acres of piedmont farmland.

Over the following decades, Brown transformed Palmer from a manual-training school into a fully accredited college preparatory and social-finishing academy that educated more than one thousand Black students from across the country. A fire in nineteen seventy-one forced its closure, but the site reopened in nineteen eighty-seven as the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Memorial State Historic Site, the first North Carolina state historic site dedicated to the achievements of an African American. The field where it all began is still there.