ELKTON, Ky. (WTVF) — A corner of Todd County that now serves as a storage area for school district buses once held a much different place in the community.
Todd County Training School served generations of Black students during segregation and became a center of education, athletics and community life in Elkton. Now, decades after the school closed and later burned, community members are working to make sure its history is not forgotten.
Charles Levell has spent years researching and preserving the school’s story. He said integration began around the time he was supposed to attend Todd County Training.
“Integration began the year I was supposed to go to Todd Training,” Levell said. “It was one of the disappointments of my life. I desperately wanted to transition from elementary to Todd Training and didn’t make it.”
The school opened in the 1940s and closed in the early 1960s as schools in Todd County began integrating.
Levell said Todd County Training was more than a school for the Black community.
“Everything your parents could do to you at home, Todd Training teachers could do that also, so it made family at school just like at home,” he said.
Basketball games, weekend gatherings and other events made the school a community hub at a time when segregation sharply divided Black and white residents.
“Back then, we were known as colored, so it was very much a dividing line between the cultures,” Levell said.
Today, the former school property is used by the district as a bus storage and garage area. There is little left on the site to show visitors what once stood there.
That is why Levell and others want a historical marker installed near the property’s entrance.
Greg Russell, a Todd County school board member representing District 3, has a personal connection to the school. Both of his parents attended Todd County Training, and his father was among the school’s first four seniors.
“My mom was a cheerleader, my dad played on the basketball team and he was involved with student government,” Russell said.
Russell said the school’s influence can still be seen through the generations of students and families who came through it.
“The history of Todd County can’t be told without telling the history of this school,” Russell said. “So many have come from this school and gone on to become doctors and lawyers — great things that should be recognized.”
Levell said the school taught Black students that their futures did not have to be limited by the circumstances surrounding them.
“They taught you, you can be more than a sharecropper, you can be more than a farmer,” Levell said. “Todd County Training showed us we can be anything.”
Russell said that message carried into his own family.
“That dream that you can do anything came from my parents, my father Stanley Russell and Benny Russell, because of what they learned here,” he said.
Much of the school’s documented history, however, was lost after the building burned.
Levell said the cause of the fire was never clear to him, but the destruction took school records, trophies and evidence of student accomplishments with it.
“There’s very little history about the school,” Levell said. “I did write a book to try and leave a historical footprint of the school.”
He points to athletic achievements as one example of history that can now be difficult to verify.
“We once had a guy score 50 points in a basketball game at Todd County Training,” Levell said. “It didn’t even make the local newspaper.”
Levell said those are the kinds of accomplishments that risk disappearing when records are lost and stories are not preserved.
Russell believes a historical marker would give current and future generations a permanent reminder of the school’s importance.
“It does need to stand toward the front entrance so people have the ability to see it and recognize it,” Russell said.
He said preserving the school’s story means acknowledging both the difficult and successful parts of Todd County’s past.
“It’s our community, and you need to know from which you came,” Russell said. “There are many diamonds that have come from this county and sprung from this school. Their stories need to be told and appreciated and celebrated.”
For Levell, the marker would represent far more than the building that once stood on the site.
“That historical marker will not only tell people who have never been here, but tell their children that lived here that once upon a time the Harvard of Black schools, the Grambling of Black schools, was right here in Elkton, Kentucky — Todd County Training,” Levell said.
Levell said only a small piece of the former school remains today. He's hopeful the community will rally around them to get a historical marker
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