From deep in Faust Park, the music starts: “America the Beautiful.” A group of about 100 people has gathered in the Faust Park Historic Village, a collection of 20 old buildings behind the park’s Butterfly House, playground, and carousel. The buildings date from 1840–1910, and they give a peek at what life was like for the early residents of the lands that now make up St. Louis County. The St. Louis County Parks Department has relocated them to the park over the years, and today, they’re dedicating a new addition.
African Schoolhouse #4, a small log house with white siding and red shutters, is Missouri’s oldest surviving one-room schoolhouse; it’s been relocated to the park from Wild Horse Creek Road in Chesterfield. In 1893, Black West County residents successfully sued to open a school for their children in Chesterfield, and when it was completed in 1894 at a cost of $600, students in first through eighth grades attended school, with no separation between the age groups, in the same teeny 15-by-19-foot room. There was no cafeteria, no restroom, and no playground. When the school closed in the 1950s and the children were sent to integrated schools, the property was sold, and the schoolhouse was converted into a garage. For years, it hid in plain sight and the parks department tried—unsuccessfully—to acquire it. Finally, in 2021, a newer owner, Muwafaq Abdel Baset, donated the structure to the parks department, and the county enlisted the help of the St. Louis County Parks Foundation to raise the money needed to strip off its newer vinyl siding, then dismantle and rebuild the structure, log by log, in Faust Park.
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FYI: Faust Park is located at 15025 Faust Park Dr.
A woman in a fur-trimmed cape steps up to the microphone in front of the schoolhouse. She is Doris Frazier, a former substitute teacher at African Schoolhouse #4, who moved to Chesterfield in 1950. After the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional, Frazier says she met with the Rockwood District Board of Education and asked to allow the kids from African Schoolhouse #4 to attend the Rockwood District schools. “I told them that [not] one person sitting on that school board would allow their kids in this day and time to be in a one-room school,” she says. “You see some of the kids standing here today who have gone to college. That’s what I was interested in—our kids having the same education as any other kid.”
Today, you can peek inside the schoolhouse and find blackboards with 75-year-old math lessons still chalked on them. Portraits of presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln hang at the front of the room. Mark Ohlendorf, president of the St. Louis County Parks Foundation, has plans to commission video interviews with former students of African Schoolhouse #4, so visitors can cue them up on their phones in front of the structure. Until then, the schoolhouse sits in the middle of an idyllic park, a reminder of a not-so-idyllic recent past.
