Wheatley School

A two-story public school of light buff brick under a flat roof, plain and horizontal in the manner of St. Louis's turn-of-the-century neighborhood schools. Brick pilasters divided the walls into bays of large, many-paned windows grouped two and three together, and a slightly projecting central entrance pavilion carried a stone nameplate lettered WHEATLEY SCHOOL above the door. The building sat behind a low wooden picket fence on an unpaved street, its buff brick and plain stone sills nearly its only ornament.

Wheatley School, also known as Colored School No. 7, was one of the segregated public schools the St. Louis Board of Education maintained for African American children under Missouri's system of legally separate education. It took its name from Phillis Wheatley, the enslaved West African woman who in 1773 became the first African American to publish a book of poetry. The school stood at 4239 Papin Street and served the Black community on that part of the city's west-central side. Emil Boehl photographed the building in 1895, when it appears relatively new; like the city's other numbered "Colored Schools," it operated under the separate-but-equal doctrine that governed American public education until the mid-twentieth century. The building has since been lost — one of many early African American schoolhouses in St. Louis that survive only in photographs and the Board of Education's records. Its exact construction date, its architect, and the year of its demolition are not established here.