ORANGE PARK – By unanimous vote, the Orange Park Town Council approved a motion Tuesday to place a historical marker where the Orange Park Normal and Industrial School once stood, a school that was anything but normal in its time.

When Orange Park’s Normal School opened October 7, 1891, it was the only place where both white and black students could learn together under the same roof in Florida. Council members now want to honor the school with a monument where it once stood.

As part of the town’s vote, a special fund for donations will open for the monument, which is still in the planning. To jumpstart donations, the town will use $3,750 previously budgeted to hire a new public works mechanic at the start of the year.

“I was very taken by the whole story about the Normal School,” said Council member Connie Thomas. “We want to celebrate diversity and come together.”

Thomas intends to work with state archivists to certify that Orange Park Normal School was perhaps the only integrated school of its time in the state of Florida.

The school – founded and operated by the New York-based American Missionary Association –was certainly ahead of its time. Ten instructors migrated from the north to teach curricula centered on core classes such as grammar, educational sermons and industrial necessities such as drafting.

The school rested among acres of oak and orange trees and hanging Spanish moss near where town hall, vast networks of roads and fast food restaurants now sit.

During this time, Florida’s Jim Crow laws harbored some of the harshest penalties in the country. For instance, blacks and whites who entered a railroad car reserved for the other race could be sentenced to the pillory or whipped 39 times – or both.

Florida also rewarded informants $500 for reporting cases of miscegenation, proof that xenophobia was rampant, lucrative and well-received in the community.

There were already laws in place prohibiting blacks and whites from learning in the same place, but these did not apply to private schools. AMA missionaries – then the most outspoken advocates for black education – started the school promoting the inclusion of all races.

The AMA intended to “nourish a healthy growth, so far as we shall have the means to do so, and send out new influences from this school which shall be educative and helpful for a large section of the country,” according to a report by Florida State University History Professor Joe M. Richardson, who has written at length about the school for The Florida Historical Quarterly.

Within its first four months, attendance grew from 26 to 78 students with a faculty of 10 teachers, some of which were black. By 1894, the school had won more than 30 prizes and honorable mentions from the Southern Florida Fair in Orlando and lauded for its curriculum.

The school’s success led the AMA to tout that “this young school is doing a work of unestimatable value. On this very sport, where less than a generation ago gangs of slaves toiled under the overseer’s lash and within rifle-shot of the plantation’s whipping post, their children are now developing into worthy” citizens.

The school sought to train black teachers as one of its core missions as well. This was perhaps the main reason for a mounting opposition against the school’s existence.

Then Florida Superintendent of Public Instruction William N. Sheats led the assault on the school after his election in 1893. He had experience as superintendent in Alachua and ran his campaign with the tagline “the biggest little giant in education.”

Sheats had been a delegate to the Florida Constitutional Convention of 1885 and authored section 12, which declared blacks and whites must learn in different schools.

Sheats wrote in his first report after his election that “any effort to enforce mixed education of the races ... would forever destroy the public school system at one swoop.”

Sheats had already clashed with the principal of State Normal College for Colored Students in Tallahassee for “focusing too much on academics.” It wasn’t long before The Normal School would see the creation of special laws specifically targeting its operation.

Sheats lobbied on two different occasions for the legislature to shutter the school, and in May 1985, legislators granted his request. New laws were created making it illegal for whites to teach blacks, blacks to teach whites and prohibited any entity from operating a school of any kind where whites and blacks are “instructed or boarded within the same building, or taught in the same class, or at the same time by the same teachers.”

In response to criticism, Sheats called the school a “social and moral blotch,” a “vile encroachment on our social and moral system” and called its operators “fanatical equalists.”

The AMA fought back against Sheats’ law and encouraged its teachers to work regardless of the consequences. And they did.

It took Sheats until April 6, 1896 until he could indict anyone on charges. Deputies arrested the principal, five teachers, three white patrons and a local congregational minister. AMA immediately paid their bail.

The school continued to operate, but Sheats’ continued to threaten jail time for teachers but the AMA could not keep posting bail. The fervor he created scared away many white parents and, with the opening of a nearby white school in Orange Park, there was less reason for whites to attend the school.

In 1911, the school’s chapel burned down in what the AMA called “a vicious but unsuccessful attempt to destroy the whole plant” but school buildings remained.

The next year, legislators passed a law prohibiting whites to teach in black schools. The school officially closed a year later due to mounting legislative pressure.

The town aims to unveil the monument on President’s Day of 2018. There are no initial indications on what the monument might look like.

“I do believe this is the first historical marker honoring the plight of the black community in Clay County, as well as the honoring of teachers who would not give up,” Thomas said. “They were willing to be jailed and see their church burned down in order to freely educate children no matter their color.”