$25K check will help preserve history

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July 28, 2009

By Karen Middleton The News Courier Tue Jul 28, 2009, 08:54 PM CDT

Athens City Councilman Jimmy Gill said he was riding by the site of the former Trinity High School, from which he graduated in 1966, and commented to fellow councilman Ronnie Marks, “I wonder if Senator Butler could help us out with this project.”

Gill is part of the Athens-Limestone Community Association, which is trying to raise about $1 million to restore the site as a museum and cultural attraction.

“That was an expensive ride Ronnie and I took that day,” Gill said Tuesday at the school site before state Sen. Tom Butler, D-Madison, presented Gill and other members of the association and Trinity alumni with a check for $25,000.

“I am so very thankful for Sen. Butler,” Gill said. “He is one person I can count on. He has helped me with so many things.”

The money will be used to preserve the history of the school, which was on the site, and to create a museum to record the history of the site from 1812 forward or, as association member Richard Martin says, “from slavery to Union soldiers to Trinity.”

Trinity High School, a school for black students founded in 1865 and closed in 1970 with the advent of integration, sits on the site that was once Fort Henderson, a Civil War-era earthwork structure.

The American Missionary Association established Trinity School in Athens in 1865 for the education of newly emancipated slaves and their children. The school was located first in an old wooden structure just east of downtown Athens, then in a new brick building near the passenger depot, a site now occupied by the new Limestone County Courthouse Annex.

When that building burned, the school moved west of town to Coleman Hill on Brownsferry Street to the site on which Fort Henderson stood. It operated continuously there through the 1969-1970 school year.

For most of its 105-year history, Trinity was the only school in Limestone County that offered a high school education to black students.

The school turned out many outstanding graduates. One of those graduates, the late Judge R. Eugene Pincham, reorganized the defunct Athens-Limestone Community Association before his death in 2008.

The group will need about $1 million in donations and grants for the project.

Phase I will require about $115,000 for an architect, engineering services, archaeologist, site preparation and cleanup.

Phase II, which is set for completion in 2015, will include reconstruction of the facility’s library, band room, agriculture building for a museum, as well as fort construction.

Property cleanup has already begun and organizers are also collecting memorabilia and writing a history of the school. An architectural rendering of the site is also complete.

“We’ve got the plans, now we’re just looking for the funding,” Gill said.

Butler said the funds go for a two-pronged advantage for the community.

“This is a historical renovation project but it is also a tourist attraction,” Butler said. “The last Trinity reunion brought in about 1,000 people who gathered at the Von Braun Center. But this could keep folks here and bring this money back to this community. This $25,000 is just a down payment. I appreciate Jimmy Gill for all he does and for working for this community.”

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