Walker-Grant School

Joseph Walker was born into slavery in Spotsylvania County. Jason Grant's father fled Kentucky bondage for Ontario, escaping a whipping. Grant learned to teach in Canadian schools and at Wilberforce in Ohio; Walker was almost entirely self-taught and unable to read or write well. In 1905, the two men opened the Fredericksburg Normal and Industrial Institute in the basement of Shiloh Baptist Church — twenty students, no public funding, donations only. It was the first high school for Black students in the city.

The school moved the next year to a farmhouse in Moorefield, a neighborhood that became known as Mayfield. A new building went up in the 1920s: four classrooms, a science lab, an office, and boarding rooms for about twenty students. By 1935 the financial burden on the Black community had grown too great. The Institute was failing. In 1938 the city absorbed it into the public system, merging it with the nearby Black elementary school. The combined school was named Walker-Grant.

The school was built in 1938 and added to the National Register in October 1998. When Fredericksburg integrated its schools in 1968, Walker-Grant became the city's middle school, serving white and Black students together. The middle school moved to a new building in 1988. The original Walker-Grant still houses school district offices and the Head Start program — a working building named for two men who built what their city would not.