Announced by a long white fence, a barn complex, and boxwoods forming the letters PWS, this campus is the largest of only four historically black boarding schools still operating in the United States. The coeducational school began in 1910 as Piney Woods Country Life School, founded by Iowa native Laurence C. Jones, who brought Booker T. Washington’s vision of industrial and vocational education for African Americans to central Mississippi.
Moving to Rankin County in 1909, Jones began teaching children to read in an old slave cabin converted to a shed on the property of black farmer Ed Taylor. Soon, Taylor donated the cabin, acreage, and $50 to get the school started. (The cabin, now at the rear of campus, is protected inside a brick structure adjacent to a small cemetery containing the graves of Jones and other early teachers.) As president of the school, Jones spent the next sixty-five years living his motto of educating “the hands, the head, the heart.” Students worked in the kitchen, on the farm, and in other capacities to help pay for their room and board.
The campus buildings wind along a ridge, with lower areas reserved for athletic fields, a lake, and an amphitheater. Students supervised by faculty constructed most of the initial buildings, as funding and time allowed. The distinctive gray concrete “brick” used for most of the pre-1960 buildings was produced by male students in a press (now housed in the school’s museum); the concrete did not require firing. Most of the buildings are two stories in height and simply finished, though recent porticos have added a hint of classicism. The first large-scale construction program included four buildings, three of which still stand: Dulaney Hall (1921), the girls’ dormitory with kitchen and dining hall in the basement; Lloyd Hall (1921), the boys’ dormitory and industrial arts shop; and the president’s house (1922) for Jones and his wife, educator Grace Allen Jones. This last, the most stylish building, is Craftsman-influenced and of tan brick, with sleeping porches.
The only new building in the 1930s was the Grace Jones Memorial Log Cabin (1939), honoring her service to women on campus and in the community. Students began work on the largest building on campus, Chandler Auditorium and Academic Building, in 1954 and completed it around 1960. The steel-framed auditorium in front (the last section to be finished), built into a hillside, concludes with four levels of classrooms at the rear. Later buildings included the Ralph Edwards Administration Building (1960) and the Caldwell Dining Hall (1961), both clad in local Catahoula sandstone. The only building known to have had an architect, Mary Mac Hall (1981, Craig Architects), was constructed after Laurence Jones’s death in 1975.
A campus beautification program after World War II was overseen by James deJornette Plummer (1879–1958), a Tuskegee graduate. Built of a synthetic marble Plummer invented and called Plummarble, Plummer’s circular patio outside Dulaney Hall embraces a memorial to Grace Jones and is decorated with etchings of world monuments and moral precepts. Plummer used Catahoula stone for his sunken rock amphitheater ( pictured above) at the center of the campus. Adding character to the grounds are a bell tower and signs with Laurence Jones quotations urging diligence and Christian virtue. The 500-acre farm, still worked by students, includes a multigabled livestock barn and two round silos.