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The Natchitoches Parish Training School Building

 “In most of the Southern states, services to black schools have been confined largely to the program of increasing and improving physical facilities. This effort should continue but, at the same time, a program for intelligent use of available facilities should be well established.” W. H. Brown & W. A. Robinson, Serving Negro Schools: A Report on the Secondary School Study (1946) 
   
             
 

The Natchitoches Parish Training School building was constructed in 1925 with funding from the Rosenwald Fund. Prior to this time, a private primary school, the Lincoln Institute, had been formed in 1912 and later deeded to the Natchitoches Parish School Board in 1919. In 1938, an elementary school building was added to the school site, constituting the four modern frame buildings that served the experimental efforts of the Secondary School Study. The program of study included grades 1-11 with the 12th grade serving as the introductory year of a   teacher education  training program for Louisiana State Negro Normal School (Grambling State University). In 1952, Natchitoches Parish Training School was renamed Central High School and, in 1969, the secondary school students were moved to a new building at a different site. The next year, 1970,  Central High School and Natchitoches High School were integrated forming Natchitoches Central High School.  The original site of the Natchitoches Parish Training School now serves as the Ben Johnson Auditorium and houses memorabilia from this historic school.

 

From the 1946 Secondary School Study catalogue description
of the Natchitoches Parish Training School

Gaddis Hall, Principal to 1940
F.M. Richardson, Principal 1941

The school plant consists of four modern frame buildings which are very well equipped for the nature of the work that goes on in them.  The campus is beautifully landscaped with flowers and shrubs around all buildings.  The school serves both elementary and high school pupils and has an enrollment of eight hundred pupils and twenty-three teachers.  The school population is made up of both rural and urban children of about fifty percent each.  This is the only four-year high school in the parish.  Therefore, it serves both the town and the rural area.  The school offers the general course, a home economics course, an agricultural course and an industrial arts course.  It is not accredited by the regional association. 

     The town of Natchitoches is the oldest settlement in the Louisiana Purchase and has a rich history connected with it.  There are more blacks in the parish than there are whites.  The colored population is made up of a large number of biracial people and individuals of French and Indian descent.  The majority of people find employment as domestic servants, truck drivers, hotel workers and farm hands.  Others work at filling stations, laundries and cafeterias.  The entire population of the town is 7,500.  There is a large number of wholesale houses, oil mills, and cotton gins located in the town.  Most of the working people find employment in these establishments.   
from W. H. Brown & W. A. Robinson, Serving Negro Schools: A Report on the Secondary School Study (1946)

  
           
   


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