This one-room schoolhouse —named in honor of Reverend Ezekiel Stanley— is located on Bayley Avenue and Route 16 in Cambridge, Maryland. If you want to see the inside of it, call 410-228-6657 to make an appointment. And if you visit you also should make time to swing by the nearby Harriet Tubman Center.

These photographs remind us that schools were once very rudimentary local institutions. The federal government had next-to-nothing to do with public schooling for most of the nation’s history. And with local control, unfortunately, came segregation and unequal schooling.