Fairfax Colored School

Fairfax Colored School

1870-1920

In the late 1870s, an ex-confederate officer, George W. Gaines devoted a portion of his property that was near the Fairfax Courthouse for an African American school, near an already existing African American church and cemetery. The one-room school was in operation for almost fifty years. No written records exist of the earliest teachers. Family history states that Philip Hughes of Hughesville taught there in 1907. In the 1920s, the community banded together to form the Fairfax Colored School League to petition the School Board to replace the broken-down school that had no sanitary facilities with a new school.

The Fare Facs Gazette, Winter 2006 Volume 4, Issue 1.

Schools

Main Street near the Courthouse

Town of Fairfax in Fairfax County, later Fairfax City