Colored School No. 5 was a one-story brick schoolhouse at Montgomery Street and Leffingwell Avenue, built in the late 1860s or early 1870s as part of St. Louis's post-Civil War system of segregated schools for Black children. The building featured a curved Baroque-style parapet above the entrance facade, a central arched doorway, and arched windows along the side elevation — a modest but distinctive design typical of the period's institutional vernacular. An 1875–76 photograph preserved in the St. Louis Public Library's Bicentennial Lantern Slide collection shows students and teachers gathered on the sidewalk in front of the school. Around 1890, when the St. Louis school system renamed its numbered "colored schools" after prominent African Americans, the building became Banneker Elementary School, honoring Benjamin Banneker (1731–1804), the self-taught Black mathematician and astronomer who helped survey Washington, D.C.
Missouri's 1865 constitution required public support for Black education but mandated separate schools. The St. Louis school system responded by establishing twelve numbered "Colored Schools" beginning in 1866. Colored School No. 5, at the corner of Montgomery Street and Leffingwell Avenue, was among the earliest — standing by at least 1875–76, when it appeared in a lantern slide photograph documenting the city's Black schools. Around 1890, the school board renamed all twelve numbered colored schools for prominent African Americans. Colored School No. 5 became Banneker Elementary School, the first St. Louis school to bear that name. At some point before 1930, as the neighborhood's demographics shifted and enrollment patterns changed, the Banneker name and school community relocated to the former Stoddard School building at 2840 Lucas Avenue (now Samuel T. Shepard Drive) in Midtown. The Montgomery and Leffingwell building was subsequently closed and demolished; no date of demolition has been established. The Banneker name continued through two more buildings — the Stoddard School (demolished 1939) and the current 1940 Art Deco building designed by George W. Sanger, which still stands in Midtown and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
