Jonas and Bertha LaBranche Johnson, graduates of Alcorn College and Tuskegee Institute, respectively, established this Christian school for African Americans to confront what they called the “wilderness of ignorance in Mississippi.” Their residence, now a museum named the 1907 House, was an antebellum cottage that had stood at the center of the former Magee Plantation.
Prentiss Institute developed slowly with buildings organized in a roughly semicircular arrangement on the uneven terrain. Similar to Piney Woods Country Life School (JM85), the private institution operated a public accredited high school, which was housed in the H-shaped, rusticated concrete-block Rosenwald Building at the center of the campus. Constructed in 1926 by African American builder Malcolm LaBranche, it contains six classrooms, an auditorium, and offices in the basement. The institute added a junior college in 1931. Brick dormitories, Glattly Hall (1947) for girls and Noble Robinson Hall (1963) for boys, built to plans donated by N. W. Overstreet, housed the booming post-World War II student enrollment. At its height from the 1940s through the 1960s, the campus had 700 students, 500 acres of farmland, and 24 buildings, including a dairy and other vocational buildings. Overstreet, Ware, Ware and Lewis designed the one-story Ruby E. Stutts Lyells Library (1969), named for Mississippi’s first black librarian and distinguished by its blue panel spandrels, and the two-story Ransom Olds Hall (1969). The multicolored all-steel cafeteria (1970, Cole Steel Company) is now a Head Start Center.
The school struggled to find its place after desegregation, and it closed in 1989. The Johnsons are buried in front of the 1907 House. Across the road from the Rosenwald Building, a small cemetery contains the graves of the white Tyrone family who sold the land to the Johnsons and later served on Prentiss Institute’s board.