Fargo Training School Historic District

About this property

The Fargo Training School in Fargo, Arkansas was founded as a private school initially known as the Fargo Agricultural School. It was an historically important school from the segregation era, and its surviving campus was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010. The campus includes five historic buildings. Floyd B. Brown was the child of Black tenant farmers in Mississippi. His mother encouraged him to study under Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute, and he did so, earning a high school certificate in 1917. While studying, he also was a book salesman, and sold books at Fargo, Arkansas. He then studied at the Phelps Hall Bible School at Tuskegee and became an ordained Baptist minister the next year. At this time, schools were segregated and public schools were not available to Black children. Brown returned to Fargo to start a school there for Black students similar to what he experienced at Tuskegee. Brown was drawing upon what he learned from Booker T. Washington and at Tuskegee Institute and also from the Rosenwald schools being built throughout the American South. The stated goal of "head, heart, and hand" with vocational and academic education even for students who could not pay the tuition mirror that of John Brown University which was established at the same time in Arkansas. === Fargo Agricultural School (FAS) (1920-1949) === The original school was on 20 acres of land southeast of Fargo. It opened on Jan. 1, 1920 with a one-room building, one teacher named Ruth Mahon, and fifteen elementary school age students. The next year, his wife Lillian Epps Brown taught and headed a new home economics department. It soon grew into a boarding school for high school students. It was a private, coeducational, nondenominational residential school that offered "training for the head, hands and heart". The school offered a combination of academic and vocational education, terminating in a high school diploma, at a time when Black people in the United States had an average of five years or less of formal education. The first graduate, Ms. Willie Starks (Class of 1924), went on to AM&N at Pine Bluff (now University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff and became a teacher. In the 1930s and 1940s, the tuition, room, and board fees were $15 a month but nobody was turned away for lack of money. The school's finances were aided by its farm and home economic crafts, and by Brown's significant fundraising efforts. By 1945, the school had grown from the initial 20 acres to 550 acres, with 12 buildings, and 180 students. Students and faculty built the buildings and made products for the school to sell.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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