Introduction
While the school system was never fully segregated in Crawfordsville, Indiana, the city funded a separate school for Black students during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Lincoln School for Colored Children operated from approximately 1882 to 1947, occupying two different buildings while in operation. The city’s Black residents used the Lincoln School—and later the city’s Lincoln Recreation Center, which occupied the second building from the 1950s until its demolition in the 1980s—as a safe gathering space for community members of all ages to learn, play, and share experiences.
While the buildings that housed Crawfordsville's Lincoln School for Colored Children no longer stand as reminders of the existence of segregated education in the city, the lack of physical buildings does not erase this history. Several community members and organizations are working on remembering and commemorating this history today.
This exhibit was not created without collaboration or community input. Originally created and displayed as a physical exhibit at the Wabash College Lilly Library in February 2024 for Black History Month, the exhibit tells a succinct story of the Lincoln School for Colored Children originally intended for students, staff, and faculty at the College to educate them about local Crawfordsville history. The Robert T. Ramsay, Jr. Archival Center worked with local community members and historians Shannon Hudson and Vicke Hudson-Swisher in the research for their book To Remember the Forgotten School: Lincoln School for Colored Children. Their work served as the foundation for the Carnegie Museum of Montgomery County’s 2023-2024 exhibit Unequal and Undaunted: Education and Community at Lincoln School for Colored Children curated by Janna Bennett (Curator), which contained biographies on Lincoln School teachers and students, artifacts, and more in-depth information on education in Crawfordsville, Indiana. The Ramsay Archival Center collaborated with the Carnegie Museum to provide access to excerpts of oral history interviews discussing the Lincoln School and Lincoln Recreation Center from the Wabash College Black Oral History Project Collection. This exhibit builds off of the research of these many individuals, and the Ramsay Archival Center is proud to support these community history initiatives and collaborations.
Evan N. Miller, M.A., M.L.I.S.
Digital Archivist, Robert T. Ramsay, Jr. Archival Center, Lilly Library, Wabash College