rter of section 29, on which the
academy is located and the southeast quarter of the section adjoining it
on the north. The board of education for this Oak Hill district was
organized on February 20th following, by the election of Henry Prince,
chairman, Rev. R. E. Flickinger, Secretary; and Malinda A. Hall,
treasurer. All this was done at a time, when the county superintendent
could not think otherwise, than that the teachers and work at the
academy were in some way under his jurisdiction. A little later the Oak
Hill district was quietly quashed and its honorable board of education
went into "innocuous desuetude."

This incident is narrated because it illustrates what was then taking
place all over McCurtain county, and all the other counties of the new
state. The law provided that a district and a school might be
established wherever there were six pupils to attend the school and the
people furnished a building for it. In a short time three schools for
the colored people were established in the vicinity of the academy, and
parents were made to believe that they must send their children to these
schools or penalties would be imposed on them. A host of colored
teachers from Texas and other localities were attracted to the new state
to meet the needs of the public schools, now for the first time
established in the rural districts.

The mission schools previously established for many years in the chapels
of the churches of the Presbytery of Kiamichi became public schools and
the pastors that continued to teach became public school teachers.
Parents were also for the first time in their lives, taxed for the
support of their local school. Will they be able and willing to pay
their annual taxes and additional tuition or board at Oak Hill for the
education of their children.

These important changes, occurring both in the immediate neighborhood
and also in distant ones that furnished the supply of students for Oak
Hill, were destined to exert considerable influence on the work of that
institution. What the effect of that influence would be, was a matter of
great anxiety and constant watchfulness on the part of the
superintendent. The previous missions of our Freedmen's Board at
Muskogee, Atoka and Caddo were abandoned as unnecessary as soon as the
increasing population of those towns made adequate provision for the
public education of their colored children. Shall this be the outcome of
the work at Oak Hill, now that the r