Piney Woods Country Life School
private, boarding school in Piney Woods, MS, USA
The Piney Woods Country Life School (or The Piney Woods School) is a co-educational independent historically African-American boarding school for grades 9–12 in Piney Woods, unincorporated Rankin County, Mississippi, 21 miles (34 km) south of Jackson. It is one of four remaining historically African-American boarding schools in the United States. It is the largest African-American boarding school, as well as being the second oldest continually operating African-American boarding school. Its campus was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2020.
History
The Piney Woods School was founded in 1909 by Laurence C. Jones. Jones added the Mississippi School of the Blind for Negroes in the early 1920s, and in 1929, with the arrival of Martha Louise Morrow Foxx serving as principal, the Mississippi Blind School for Negroes was founded at Piney Woods. The school eventually moved to an urban location in Jackson, Mississippi.
Piney Woods was where the International Sweethearts of Rhythm were formed, by Jones, in 1937. The band included jazz musician Helen Jones, the daughter of the school's founder.
Other bands associated with the school included the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi and the Cotton Blossom Singers.
“Piney Woods Country Life School” enters the record as private, boarding school in Piney Woods, MS, USA. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Piney, Woods and Country can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7195641. VIAF identifies the subject as 132545588. The Library of Congress control number is n82079269. Authority coordinates are 32.062, -89.995. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2020, 1909, 1929 and 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “Piney Woods Country Life School” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.