For Christiansburg Institute, digitizing of its history ongoing
CHRISTIANBURG — A century of educational Black history in the New River Valley is worth preserving online for a worldwide audience, said leadership at Christiansburg Institute.
“It’s not in the history books,” said Debbie Sherman-Lee, who attended Christiansburg Institute one year as an eighth grader. “It was wonderful.”
Sherman-Lee now chairs the Christiansburg Institute cultural heritage nonprofit, whose mission statement includes “responsible stewardship of African American history, stories, and culture.”
The Christiansburg Institute opened as a Freedmen’s Bureau school after the Civil War in 1866 and grew to a 185-acre campus serving thousands of Black students, under advisement of noted civil rights leaders such as Booker T. Washington.
During the era of segregation, Christiansburg Institute served as a regional Black high school for 15 surrounding counties, then operated by Montgomery County.
Sherman-Lee remembers looking down the hill as a pupil at Friends Elementary, now the county schools’ Corps of Cadets building, seeing the older Christiansburg Institute students walking between buildings during class change, and wanting to be there.
“Montgomery County missed the opportunity for letting students stay on that campus, and having a school there to use that land,” she said. “It could have been like a community college.”
Christiansburg Institute closed in 1966, after Sherman-Lee’s eighth grade year, when public schools integrated. Classmates from across the New River Valley were scattered to their local school divisions, separated from each other.
“It was hard,” Sherman-Lee said. “I didn’t have my friends from the African American communities in my classes.”
Worse yet, she said, were feelings of educational neglect when she got to Christiansburg High School.
“The teachers at Christiansburg Institute were very strict, but they were caring. They wanted us to be able to go out with a purpose,” Sherman-Lee said. “We didn’t feel that when we went to Christiansburg High School. We didn’t feel that we even mattered.”
On top of everything, Black students faced discrimination from their peers.
“The name-calling was a big thing,” she said. “Some of my friends had it even harder than I did.”
To learn Christiansburg Institute’s hundred-year history is to recall difficulties faced by marginalized people in Appalachia, and the strides taken to overcome discrimination through education.
You can learn about that history online now with a growing collection of digitized content from the Christiansburg Institute archives, Sherman-Lee said.
“It is important for people to know about Christiansburg Institute,” she said. “There are so many people that live here most of their lives, and they have no idea that Christiansburg Institute was even there.”
More historical content is regularly being uploaded to the Christiansburg Institute digital archives, like the soon-to-come Edgar A. Long papers, she said. Long served as Christiansburg Institute principal from 1906 to 1924, and was a mentee of Booker T. Washington.
“Much like Booker T. Washington, Edgar Long wrote extensively about his thoughts on education, religion, race relations, his ideas of a path forward for the United States, and even some beautiful poetry,” said Christianburg Institute Curator Jenny Nehrt. “We have a couple hundred pages of his handwritten notes, lectures and speeches that we’re really excited to digitize and share.”
Christiansburg Institute is digitizing its physical shelves using some oversized scanning equipment, Nehrt said. A grant allowed the institute to purchase that hardware, with help on the application from University Libraries at Virginia Tech, said Digital Preservation Coordinator Alex Kinnaman.
“We hope that this relationship is the perfect case study to build a foundation of trust with other regional communities, so that we can do the same thing with their materials,” Kinnaman said of Virginia Tech helping digitize historic archives. “It’s all so valuable and so dang cool, but so many local organizations just don’t have the expertise or funding or technology access to be able to do it.”
She encouraged people with archives of their own to contact university libraries about online preservation.
At Christiansburg Institute, the digitizing of more than 50,000 pages from the school’s history will continue until June 2024, Nehrt said. The physical archives can be browsed as well, for now at 125 Arrowhead Trail, Suite F, in Christiansburg, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
“We’re still working to renovate the Edgar A. Long building, which is the last surviving campus building,” Nehrt said. “We hope to renovate that building within the next couple years and move our museum and archives into it.”