WILLIAM BENSON AND THE KOWALIGA SCHOOL

Alabama Heritage, Spring 2005 by Sznajderman, Michael, Atkins, Leah Rawls

THE WATERS OF LAKE MARTIN NOW COVER MUCH OF A ONCEEXTRAORDINARY BLACK SCHOOL AND INDUSTRY ON KOWALIGA CREEK, BUT THE LEGACY OF THEIR FOUNDER SURVIVES.

JUST OFF A DIRT ROAD IN Tallapoosa County and a few feet into a patch of forest lies the concrete tomb of William E. Benson. Most of the land Benson once owned now lies beneath Lake Martin. His home was spared from the rising water only to be destroyed by fire a few years later. The stone remains of its foundation can still be seen on the lake's southern shore, while to the north most maps of the lake mark the Benson church. But the more evocative monument to this extraordinary man hides a short distance away, down a gentle slope of pines and twisting vines, beyond a long row of carefully planted, century-old crepe myrtles not far from the shore of the lake. Barely visible through the brush stands an old bell tower. A century ago, it summoned youngsters across an open expanse of terraced lawn to the classrooms of the Kowaliga Academic and Industrial Institute, the school Benson founded. Although on the verge of collapse, the shingled walls and quartz foundation of the tower continue to reflect the craftsmanship of the students who built it.

These few remnants of the school and the community that revolved around it offer a spare tribute to the impressive scope of William E. Benson's life work. Over a period of thirty years, hundreds of rural black children from across the area received their schooling at Kowaliga. At its height Kowaliga School and its related Dixie Industrial Company controlled more than ten thousand acres and included a prosperous cotton and vegetable farm, a cotton gin and cotton seed oil mill, a general store, a sawmill, and a turpentine distillery. The community reached its crowning achievement with the construction of the Dixie Line, a standardgauge railroad running fifteen miles from the school to Alexander City, where it linked to the Central of Georgia. A March 1914 article in the Montgomery Advertiser, and an account in the New York Times later that year, credit the Dixie Line as the first railroad in the nation "conceived, promoted, built and operated by negro people." Today, the Dixie Line is also gone; only a few stretches of raised rail bed near its terminus remain.

THE KOWALIGA SCHOOL GREW OUT OF Will Benson's devotion to his "home community"-a love of the land inspired by his father, John. John Benson was born a slave in 1850. His master was probably James Benson, a Virginian who owned a plantation on Kowaliga Creek. When James Benson died in 1863 at the age of eighty-six, neighbors purchased much of his property. The Civil War, meanwhile, soon rendered John Benson a free man.

By 1870 John was working in the coal mines of the Gahaba Field in Shelby County, yet his memories of a boyhood near Kowaliga Creek would eventually draw him back. Will, who was born in 1873, recalled that his father used to earn about ten dollars a month, and saved as much as he could. In time John accumulated the impressive sum of one hundred dollars-enough to move his family to Elmore County by 1880. And by 1890 he had managed to purchase 160 acres of the old Benson plantation on credit. John Benson had come home, and over time he became a successful farmer. As his son Will described him, John Benson was a thrifty man who "could turn his hand to almost anything." Through the years John added to his land holdings, acquiring more of the old plantacrimes" that had taken place near Kowaliga. In the first, a group of masked men whipped a half-dozen blacks and then executed a witness to the beatings; in the other, a white delivery man reportedly shot and killed a respected black employee of the Tallassee Falls Manufacturing Company. The oppression and terror blacks faced locally may have led Will to the conclusion that he could not spend his time "in mere money-making." He decided to build a new school for the community's children. Will's father agreed to donate ten acres and the lumber for a two-story school building, if the community would supply the labor.

Over the next few months, Will Benson traveled the countryside gathering support. He formed a glee club with local farm boys and held concerts in towns and hamlets across the county, collecting donations at each performance. After bringing in the year's harvest in Kowaliga, local farmers set to work cutting down trees and firing bricks for the school's foundation and chimney. It took two years and the financial contributions of seventy local families and several distant benefactors to complete the building.

In 1897 Benson incorporated the Kowaliga Academic and Industrial Institute and recruited a distinguished group of individuals to the board of trustees. Booker T. Washington served for a time. Oswald Garrison Villard also served on the board. Villard, the famed editor of the New York Evening Post and its weekly edition, the Nation, later helped found the NAACP. Another important member of the board was Emily Howland. The parents of this Quaker educator and humanitarian from Sherwood, New York, had been fervent abolitionists; Howland became a key patron of Kowaliga School.