Fargo Training School

 school, agriculture, NRHP - National Register of Historic Places, historic district, International style architecture, vernacular (architecture)

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Historic former African-American school complex listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) as a historic district.

Built: 1958-1960
Architectural style: Plain Traditional; International
Areas of significance: Black Ethnic Heritage; Education
Area: 15 acres
Structures:
- Floyd Brown Building (1958; 1964 addition) - the roughly "U"-shaped building south of Floyd Brown Drive
- Mid-Delta Head Start Building (c. 1960) - nonagon-shaped building just east of the Brown Building
- Teacher's Cottage (c. 1960)
- Superintendent's Cottage (c. 1960)
- Floyd Brown Museum Building (1960) - eastern-most building on the north side of Floyd Brown Drive
- Gymnasium (c. 1960; additions in the 1980s) - largest building on the campus. The gymnasium is considered non-contributing to the NRHP listing due to the non-historic additions the building underwent in the '80s.
Date added to NRHP: 5/27/2010
Other designations: U.S. Historic District

This school complex sits on the site of an older school called the Fargo Agricultural School. That original school, like this one, was built to provide a vocational education to the area's African-American student population. Students who might otherwise have not have finished traditional high school were able to attend this school in order to gain the skills needed to go into various rural and agrarian jobs afterward. The Fargo Agricultural School operated from 1920 to 1949. The school's founder, Floyd Brown, ultimately sold the school to the state of Arkansas at the end of its operating life, and soon after, the Floyd Training School for Negro Girls was opened. In this guise, the school transformed into an educational facility that catered to delinquent African-American girls. Attendees of the school were placed here by order of the Arkansas judicial system, and treated to an alternative education with an emphasis on rehabilitation. Floyd Brown remained at the facility for the first several years of its new existence, in the role of superintendent. All of the buildings that still exist on this site today were built after Brown's final departure from the school, during a flurry of construction activity aimed at replacing older buildings. The Fargo Training School ultimately closed in 1968 as a result of the racial integration of Arkansas' public schools. Since 1980, part of the school complex has housed the Arkansas Land and Farm Development Corporation, an organization that provides technical and financial support to rural farming families, with an emphasis on African-American families.