The Board of Education purchased land for this building from Jesse & Rachel Hevelow for $10 in 1950, and the brick schoolhouse for African-Americans opened in 1952. Dr. Thomas G. Pullen, State Superintendent of Schools, and Mrs. Helen Harris, principal, spoke at the dedication that May. Once the modern facility opened, the former community schoolhouse across the street was sold to a Middletown Realtor for $2,000.
Coppin closed following integration in 1965 and there were a number of plans for the building, including use as a detachment for the state police. However, the Cecil Whig reported in 1971 that the school had been empty and boarded up since integration. It went on for other uses in time as the annex for the elementary school and as the local center for Head Start.
Briefly known as the “Cecilton Colored School,” the Board dedicated it as the Bishop Levi J. Coppin School, at the request of the PTA. The church leader had been born in 1848 in Fredericktown and went on to serve as an editor, educator, missionary and the 30th bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
For more on Levi Coppin School see
Cecilton’s Levi Coppin School Should be Saved