TAHLEQUAH, Oklahoma – A small group of independent researchers is uncovering secrets of the “Colored High School” at the headwaters of Double Springs, including unmarked graves of Freedman students who died while attending class there.
Harold Aldridge, a retired Northeastern State University professor, along with David Earl, have been working to tell the lost stories of the school and the students who attended.
Aldridge shared an old book on the “Colored High School” with Earl. The school was in an area known to Earl, who in the early 1990s was involved in stopping the city of Tahlequah’s dumping of sewage that would have run into Double Springs.
“[Then] we went to the ‘We are Cherokee: Cherokee Freedmen and the Right to Citizenship’ exhibit at the Cherokee National History Museum, and there was a photo of the school on the wall,” David Earl said. “We called the landowners and made the arrangements and [began looking for the school site].”
Brenda Bradford is lead archivist in the work with the Thomas Lee Ballenger Collection, where most of the information about the school was found. She and Missy Earl, David’s wife, led the research effort. They recently returned from an intense week of scouring the Ballenger collection.
The Ballenger Collection is housed in Chicago at the Newberry Library, an independent research facility specializing in the humanities. The original research was conducted by Ballenger, who wrote a column for the “Chronicles of Oklahoma” about the high school and was employed by NSU.
Ballenger was from Searcy, Arkansas, educated in Chicago, and came to Tahlequah, where he married a Cherokee woman. He died at age 104 in 1987.
“We found a document where the U.S. government was telling the Cherokee to treat their Freedman less well,” Bradford said. “Not only were they articulate, but you can see how well [the Cherokees] stood up to that [pressure].”
The only verifiable site is on a slight slope above the headwaters of Double Springs, David Earl said.
Due to drought conditions, the location of the foundation was visible because dry conditions killed the grass. It was as if the foundation was “painted” on the ground, and it could be seen perfectly, David Earl said.
“It had a north and south door,” he said. “The bottom floor was for education, and the two floors above were the boys’ and girls’ [dorms].”
It was a Cherokee Freedman boarding school, and students died from malaria, smallpox and tuberculous, David said.
The cost to attend the school in the 1800s was $8 a month, and the school had to maintain a head count of at least 25 to keep the doors open. The students planted cotton behind the school to raise funds to buy library books.
Ballenger spent his spare time gathering, collecting, cataloguing, and detailing Cherokee history and artifacts. In 1951, he visited the school site and wrote a couple of pages. All the research found by the group is based on Ballenger’s work.
“He’s responsible for the archives and special collections department at NSU,” David Earl said. “He had built that up for them, and Oklahoma University came over and borrowed the key crucial Cherokee artifacts and took them to OU. [They] are still there, as far as we know.”
One of the students, Hannah Webber, died of tuberculosis – a “slow death,” he said. It is unknown if she was related to the Webber family. According to Ballenger, they originally owned the property, as well as slaves.
“We’ve got the article about it; she would get up and then go down with [tuberculosis], and eventually died,” David Earl said.
Graves are situated in the front yard of the people who now own the property, as well as behind the home and possibly underneath, David said.
“A big stone in front of the house is a grave blanket that covered Mr. and Mrs. Webber’s graves,” Missy said. “And that’s from the Civil War.”
The school opened in 1890, closed at statehood in 1907, and boarders lived there for a while. In 1916, a murder happened, and then the building burned down, Missy said.
“This is a saga, with several personal stories – great gatherings, bittersweet, horrible, fantastic, and we got sucked into it,” David said.
The goal of the group is to locate the graves and document the history, he said.
“Ballenger talks about being here and seeing the cemetery in 1951,” he said.
David said the team found 13 bodies with ground-penetrating before it got too hot to continue, and the plan is to continue the effort in the fall, David said.
“There are 10 in the front, three in the back, all Freedman children,” David said. “We don’t have the documentation, but we know they were Cherokee slaveholders – the Webbers – and we know the graves had been ransacked because some fool put the information out that there was treasure buried in the graves.”
What’s next
A second article on uncovering the history of the school will be published Tuesday, Aug. 20.