School Photographs (Mississippi), 1920s-1980s

The series consists of a scrapbook containing textual information, site plans and photographs for 46 county agricultural high schools established in Mississippi between 1908 and 1924. The schools, some of which later became community colleges, taught boys and girls such fundamental skills of farm life as land drainage, terracing, orchard management, cooking, and care of livestock, in addition to furthering their academic training. For each school in the scrapbook there is a typewritten form containing information such as the nature of the school's extension work, number of classrooms, student enrollment by sex (for school year 1925-1926), acres of land owned by school and their usage, number of boarding students by sex, and number of teachers and their average salaries. The scrapbook also contains site plans for most institutions. The plans vary in quality, some being rough, amateurish sketches while others are more carefully executed and detailed. Most are not to scale. Arrangement is alphabetical by county.

This series is comprised of 1,161 loose black-and-white photographs of school buildings from thirty-one Mississippi counties, circa the 1950s. The photographs were submitted with survey reports and then stored in docket files created by the Educational Finance Commission each time it received an official request from a county for the reorganization, consolidation, or reconstitution of a school district, as mandated by the Mississippi Legislature in 1953 to improve the efficiency of the education of children and the operation of the schools. Other photographs from this survey may also be found in Series 1513: School Photograph Scrapbooks.

The series contains primarily photographs of school buildings and facilities located throughout Mississippi, mostly elementary and secondary schools but with some institutions of higher learning included. Also included are photographs of education-related subjects in other states, including several views of construction at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Items of particular interest include scenes of tornado damage in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1936 and images of the 1939 Mississippi State Fair and parade in Jackson. The photographs were digitized by MDAH in the order as received from the Mississippi Department of Education's Office of School Building and Transportation.

The series contains slides, mostly color, of public school buildings and facilities located in Mississippi and a few other states. Most are dated and identified, and some are grouped by topic for use in slide presentations. In addition to the slides there are a small number of color photographic transparencies of school buildings, facilities and workers. The slides and transparencies were digitized by MDAH in the order as received from the Mississippi Department of Education, with items 1-775 being pre-integration African American school buildings and facilities arranged alphabetically by county, 776-1400 being pre-integration white school buildings and facilities arranged alphabetically by county, 1401-1648 being slide presentations, and 1649-1688 being transparencies.

This series consists of fifty-eight scrapbooks containing photographs of school buildings from thirty-nine Mississippi counties and eleven Mississippi cities, circa 1950-1969. The photographs, which are mainly exterior views, document the condition of public schools as a requirement for the Educational Finance Commission's reorganization of school districts mandated by the Mississippi Legislature in 1953. More than half of the county scrapbooks include maps showing school location, student residences and/or transportation routes for the county. These scrapbooks originally accompanied school building survey reports, which may be found in Series 1653. Since different universities or consulting firms compiled the reports, their formats varied: some reports were accompanied by genuine photographs placed in separate albums or scrapbooks (the contents of this series, Series 1513), while other reports contained printed copies of photographs that were bound in with the text (Series 1653). Some school photographs from this survey may also be found in Series 1655, the Educational Finance Commission Docket Files.

The series contains photographs depicting various aspects of student transportation, including school buses, student safety, school bus accidents and investigations in Mississippi and other states, school bus maintenance facilities and work, and training and workshops for drivers and mechanics. Other subjects include youth safety and pupil transportation conferences, and office personnel. The photographs were digitized by MDAH in the order as received from the Mississippi Department of Education's Office of School Building and Transportation.