Gee's Bend Farms Community School added to National Register of Historic Places on March 30, 1989

Gee's Bend Farms Community School

Today – March 30 – marks 34 years since the Gee’s Bend Farms Community School was placed on the Alabama Register of Historic Places.

Also known as the Old Boykin High School, the Gee’s Bend Farms Community School was placed on the state’s historic register on March 30, 1989. For those of you unfamiliar with this old school, it was located near “downtown” Boykin, off Wilcox County Road 79. Sources reflect that this historic school building, which sits on about 11 acres, belongs to the Wilcox County Board of Education, but is leased to the Boykin Historical Association.

The one-story school was a wood frame building built on concrete block piers with clapboard walls. The building featured a gable roof, trimmed with cornices, with asphalt shingles. The building also featured a small cupola in its center and the floors were constructed of wide pine boards. In its early days, water for the school was provided by a windmill and pumphouse behind the school.

Alabama Historical Commission records reflect that the school was built in 1937 by the U.S. Government as part of an “innovative social program that was designed to make a group of destitute black tenant families into independent farm owners. To do this, the Rural Resettlement Administration purchased what had once been the 10,000-acre Pettway plantation from its three absentee landowners.

“With the help of the local residents, government workers set up a planned community that consisted of individual farmsteads, as well as a series of community buildings and cooperative enterprises that included a cooperative store, cotton gin, grist mill, plowing and haying operation, stock breeding program, medical clinic and school. Although Wilcox County was approximately 80-percent black during the Great Depression era, the participating families constituted a virtual majority of black land owners until after World War II.”

Historical Commission records go on to say that “supervision of the new community was provided by a Community Manager, an employee of the Farm Security Administration. The Gee’s Bend Community School was staffed by black teachers, who were college educated and drawn from outside the area. It can safely be said that the residents of Gee’s Bend were among the best educated in the Black Belt.”

After World War II, the school fell under the control of the Wilcox County Board of Education, which added buildings to the school campus in the 1950s. The school eventually became a high school and served as such until its closure in the 1970s.

“The entire cooperative effort, including the community school, became well known through documentary and social science research in the community,” Historical Commission sources say. “Much has been written about the Gee’s Bend community, past and present, and the importance of the social experiment which sought to enfranchise a group of black farmers made destitute by the Great Depression.”

In the end, let me hear from you if you have any additional information about the history of the Gee’s Bend Farms Community School. It would be interesting to know who the school’s first students and graduates were and if any of them are still with us. No doubt they have many fond memories of the school’s heyday between the Great Depression and World War II.