School Founder, Former Slave. Jennie Dean was freed from slavery due to the American  Civil War. After attending schools in Virginia and Washington DC, she worked as a  maid to help her family buy a farm in Prince William County, Virginia and also to pay for   one of her sisters to attend school. Around 1878, she founded a Sunday school in   Prince William County which was the start of her missionary work and her dedication to   improving opportunities for her race. She soon established additional Sunday schools,   which evolved into church congregations, including Calvary Chapel, which became   Greater Mount Calvary Christian Church. She raised money for construction of the   church buildings and offered classes in cooking and sewing and then began to plan for   a school that would teach skilled trades to black children. With the help of her sister,   who was a school teacher, and also assistance from a white teacher from the county,   Ms Dean began in 1888 to organize support locally for the school among black and   white residents, including ministers. Dean and her group chose a farm about a mile   from Manassas on the Southern Railway as the site for the school. She traveled to   Boston three years later and worked as a maid while speaking at churches about her   plans for the school, in hopes of raising support and finances. Because of her sincere   and dignified demeanor, she was able to collect contributions from residents and also   from some northern philanthropists. In 1893, with the help of Orra Gray Langhorne, she   made a presentation about the school at a meeting of the National American Woman   Suffrage Association in Washington, D.C. It was at this meeting that she met Emily   Howland, whose donation paid off the loan on the farm and provided the funds needed   for the school buildings. The Manassas Industrial School for Colored Youth received its   charter in October of 1893. The first building, Howland Hall, was dedicated on   September 3, 1894, with Frederick Douglass as the keynote speaker at the  ceremony. The school provided education and training that would lead to employment,   including dressmaking, child care, blacksmithing, cooking, carpentry, shoemaking and   farming, as well as liberal arts. Ms. Dean was the financial agent on the Board of  Directors and Executive Committee of the school, and traveled to Washington, D.C.,   New York, and Boston to raise funds, promote her school, and advocate for more  industrial schools, although she preferred being at the school, where she wrote the  code of good conduct. In 1896 she was a delegate to the annual convention of the  National Federation of Afro-American Women, which was later renamed the National   Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs. Here she told about her work in Manassas and   urged the establishment of similar schools. In 1906, she accompanied a group of  students and other faculty to meet President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House.   The meeting had been arranged by Booker T. Washington, with whom she shared the   belief in both vocational education and hard work. She encouraged all black men and   women to learn a trade, earn a living, become landowners, and pay taxes. She emphasized that these things were necessary before they objected to insufficient   opportunities or became involved with politics in any way. Following her death, school   officials continued to praise her for her role as founder of the school, which became a   regional high school for black students in 1938 but closed in 1959 and was replaced by   Jennie Dean High School the following year. Ms Dean and her school are a great   source of pride among African Americans in Northern Virginia. Jennie Dean has had a   playground, a community center, and an elementary school named in her honor. The   Manassas Industrial School and Jennie Dean Memorial, part of the Manassas Museum   System, was dedicated in 1995 at the former school’s site, which had been added to the   National Register of Historic Places the previous year. (bio by: Daddys♥Girl)