Fort Henderson/ Trinity School
During the Civil War, both the Union and Confederate armies recognized the enormous value of the Tennessee River and the railroads that connected the region. Communities often changed hands multiple times. The federal forces, both black and white, constructed Fort Henderson in 1863 during their occupation of the city. On September 24, 1864, Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest took control of the fort and the town by tricking Union Col. Wallace Campbell into believing he had many more troops than he did. The following day Forrest took another Union fort north of Athens, Sulphur Creek Trestle.
On May 28, 1865, not even two months after the war’s end, Mary Fletcher Wells, a Congregationalist missionary from Ann Arbor, Michigan working with the American Missionary Association, founded Trinity School, initially holding classes in the Baptist church in Athens. Mary Wells was a missionary from Michigan who had traveled south with her husband, who served as a chaplain in the Union Army. The goal of Trinity School was to provide education for the formerly enslaved children and adults of Athens. The location of Trinity School changed multiple times. The final location, on the Fort Henderson property, opened in 1908. The school educated African American students until 1979. The integration process in Athens, which started in 1970, eventually resulted in the schools’ closure. On the same site as the school and fort sits Trinity Congregational Church, formed in 1871, growing out of the work of Wells and others with the school. Blacks and whites worshipped together in the church from its inception, creating one of the few integrated spaces that persisted even as laws forbade such interactions.
