DORCHESTER ACADEMY

The History of the Academy

THE EARLY HISTORY OF LIBERTY COUNTY.

In 1695, Puritans from old Dorchester, Mass. migrated to Dorchester, South Carolina, near Charleston. In 1752, they again moved to 31,950 acres midway between Georgia's Ogeechee and Altamaha Rivers.
            Settlers in this area acted ahead of the rest of the province by sending Dr. Lyman Hall to the Continental Congress as a delegate from the parish of St John. Thus the county formerly known as Midway derived the name of "Liberty".
       The initial group consisted of 280 whites and 536 "colored" slaves, making up 71 families. Most of the settlers were rice planters. The Midway settlers were very religious.

Thus the Midway Congregational Church was established in 1752 and still sits by the side of what's called the Coastal Highway. The religious welfare of slaves was given the utmost consideration. The colored members of the church worshiped with the whites throughout the entire existence of the church. On sacramental Sundays, the two races communed together, the blacks in the galleries and the whites in the pews below.

THE ACADEMY

In Ante-Bellum days the State of Georgia forbade the teaching of reading and writing to black people. But soon after the Civil War, 1868, the American Missionary Association, now part of our United Church Board for Homeland Ministries, started a primary school and Congregational Church for free men three miles west of the old Midway Church. During Reconstruction (under military rule), William A Golding, a black member of the Georgia Legislature and a member and selectman in the Midway Congressional Church, wrote to the AMA to request a teacher for the school which was preferably southern born and colored, a young man of good moral character and a preacher if possible. Eliza Ann Ward, an abolitionist from Manson, Massachusetts, was sent by the AMA. She opened a school in "Golding's Grove" with an average daily attendance of 28-22 males and 17 females. Miss Ward left Liberty County for good in August, 1872. Floyd Snelson, a former slave who ministered and taught at the AMA's Andersonville, Georgia, school and did further study at Atlanta University, was hired to come to Liberty County to promote Congressionalism and foster the school. In 1879 the school prospered under his leadership and was enlarged to provide secondary education for freedman for the first time in Liberty County. It was named Dorchester Academy , referring back to the original home of the first settlers at Midway. The Academy was both a boarding and a day school. It was attended not only by the children of freedmen, but also by parents and grandparents. They had come to know the Bible orally through the ministry of Mr. Charles Colcock, a rich planter and Presbyterian clergymen. Now they wanted to read it themselves, to know it more intimately and searchingly.

" Our community of freedmen are evidently destined to great improvement in prosperity and intelligence" (Reverend J. T. H. Waite - Pastor, Old Midway Congregational Church

The American Missionary Association opened some 500 schools in the South after the Civil War. The AMA recognized that the black people could not exercise their inalienable rights except as they became not only liberated from slavery but also learned in the skills of freemen. In fact, anything less than equality of opportunity would nullify the freedom so recently obtained.

Floyd Snelson

First Minister and Principal of school

Young teachers, mainly from New England, came to teach at Dorchester and the other schools. For some it was " a southern odyssey" of a few years, for others a life career. Lura Beam, at one time their supervisor, has written of the career teachers: " They began as teachers when adult illiterates roused their protective feelings. The parental feelings never left them. At worst it turned to condescension, but most of them were humble." Yet through them "an unearthly breath of a humane tradition filtered down, generation to generation, person to person, the influence of one on another."*

In 1940, Liberty County built a consolidated public school for black youth. This marked the closing of Dorchester Academy. When the academy closed, our board encouraged the people of the community in a self-help program of economic and social improvement. The vacated facilities of the academy were turned over to a newly formed Dorchester Center, Inc.

Over the years several organizations have flourished at the Center, such as:

The Credit Union was organized in 1938;
The Farmers Union, provided small farmers with collectively owned machinery and other benefits;
Liberty County Political Council (study groups, forum for political candidates, etc.);
Dorchester Improvement Association, concerned with housing, utilization of land, health and sanitation, and recreation.

In fact, Dorchester Center as a community organization was doing in the 1940's what did not become a national emphasis until two decades later. Dorchester was a model for community development in the 1960's.

In 1968, The Liberty County school board integrated the white and black schools. This was at the behest of the black people at Dorchester. This school integration is reported to have been among the first in Georgia.

Martin Luther King and the Academy

Frequently projects originating elsewhere use the Center. In the late 1960's, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and our Board for Homeland Ministries jointly conducted the Citizenship Education Project at the Center. Grassroots leaders from all parts of the South were trained to go home and instruct their neighbors in their legal rights and responsibilities, including voters registration. Thousands of persons attended these five-day workshops.

Andrew Young, headed the project in its formative years. Martin Luther King came often to the Center. New programs kept coming along. In 1970, the local people, with modest help from our board, built a swimming pool as a center for a summer youth program. A day-care center now serves some 60 children and their mothers. The new Midway Nursing Home was initiated by Dorchester Center.

Percel Alston, once Director at Midway Congregational Church, and member of the Center's Board, had an occasion to observe: "An idea or movement, however wonderful, doesn't last unless it lives in an institution. The church has served preeminently as a support system for the black people in their struggles. "All the good that has been achieved in Liberty County on behalf of the Blacks has been linked with the Academy and the Center. Here the Blacks could come and plan, unsupervised by the Whites. Freedom to vote, hold office, have integrated schools and many other achievements were in the original purpose of the academy, and the Center took up the task."

Mr. .J. A. Lewis was once a leader in both church and community at Dorchester Center. For several years he was head of the vocational department of Liberty County High School. When asked, " How do people outside of Liberty County respond to the Center and its works, he responds:

"People in other communities often say to us, ' What a terrific community you have at Midway. We wish we had a heritage like yours!"