The Union Ridge Graded School had been founded in 1885 in the free Black community of Union Ridge, just north of Charlottesville near what is now the Ivy Creek Reservoir. After Emancipation, free Black families in the area had organized one of the first community schools in central Virginia, and Union Ridge had become a hub of education in a state that had refused to support it. The original building burned down in 1893. On the same site, the community rebuilt - this time as the Albemarle Training School, an institution that would serve all grades for African American children of Albemarle County. The naming convention was telling. Training schools, as opposed to high schools, were the lower-status designation given to Black secondary education across the segregated South; the word was a polite acknowledgement that white school boards would not allow Black students to call their schools by the same name as white students did.

The school's first principal was Jesse Scott Sammons, born in 1852 and dying in 1901. He grew up in the free Black community of Union Ridge - one of several free Black communities in the Virginia Piedmont where families had purchased land before the Civil War. He had been the first teacher at the one-room Ivy Creek school, then the first principal of the Union Ridge Graded School, and now the first principal of the rebuilt Albemarle Training School. He also edited the Charlottesville Messenger, the city's Black newspaper. Sammons died eight years into the new school's operation, but he had set the institutional template. The school would be led by African American principals and teachers - the standard practice for segregated schools in the South - and would expand its curriculum as enrollment and community pressure allowed.

The school's curriculum changed significantly over its 66 years of operation. Early decades emphasized practical trades and vocational instruction, in part because white-controlled school boards funded Black schools differently and because vocational training was the politically acceptable form of Black education in the early 20th-century South. In 1918 the school planned to open a broom factory in Charlottesville as a satellite vocational program. Mary Carr Greer, who served as principal from 1931 to 1949 after teaching Domestic Science at the school for fifteen years, led the slow but determined push to build an accredited four-year academic high school curriculum that matched what white high schools offered. By the 1940s, despite the African American population of Albemarle County actually decreasing in absolute terms, the percentage of African American children attending high school had risen substantially. Greer's institutional work made the Albemarle Training School what it had set out to be.

In 1951 Albemarle Training School's high school students were transferred to the new Burley High School in Charlottesville, a consolidation that pooled resources for a single larger Black high school serving multiple jurisdictions during the late years of segregated education. The Albemarle Training School building continued operating as an elementary school until it closed in 1959 - five years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision but before Virginia's white supremacist Massive Resistance to school integration was fully dismantled. The Albemarle Training School site lies near the current Ivy Creek Reservoir. Sammons is buried in the Sammons Family Cemetery in Charlottesville. The institution he founded outlived him by nearly six decades. What it taught and what it offered to children whose grandparents had been enslaved at Monticello is the longer measure of his work.