Qualla: Albemarle Training School

Albemarle Training School: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Jesse Scott Sammons was a descendant of the Hemings family - the same Hemings family that Thomas Jefferson held in slavery at Monticello. By 1893 Sammons was a free man, a teacher, an editor of Charlottesville's Black newspaper, and the founding principal of a new school he was about to build on the site of a graded school that had burned to the ground. The Albemarle Training School was rising in the same Virginia county where Sammons's ancestors had been owned. He intended it to be the first four-year high school for African American children in that county. It eventually was.

Albemarle Training School: From Union Ridge to Albemarle Training

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 centr...

Albemarle Training School: Jesse Scott Sammons

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 fir...

Albemarle Training School: From Trades to Academics

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Albemarle Training School: From Burley to Closure

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. Th...