The Burwell School, according to the Historic Hillsborough Commission, stands as both a milestone for women’s education in North Carolina and a reminder of the brutality of slavery in the U.S.
So to continue its efforts to represent the school’s multiple truths, the commission announced Aug. 27 it has renamed the site of one of North Carolina’s earliest women’s education programs from the Burwell School Historic Site to The Elizabeth Keckly Center at the Burwell School.
From 1837 to 1857, the Rev. Robert Burwell and Margaret Anna Robertson Burwell ran a girls’ academy on the two acres the family owned. Over 200 girls attended, many of whom began their own schools across North Carolina.
The new name honors Black seamstress and activist Keckly. Enslaved in the Burwell household from the age of 14, Keckly suffered brutal treatment and sexual abuse.
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As an adult, she purchased freedom for herself and her son and moved to Washington. There, she established a prominent dressmaking business and, during the Civil War, a relief organization for formerly enslaved people arriving in the nation’s capital.
Keckly worked as a seamstress for Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of President Abraham Lincoln, and became a confidante of the first lady. In 1868, Keckly published “Behind the Scenes,” a memoir on her enslavement, freedom and experience in the White House.
Goal is to ‘hold these histories together’
On the historic site’s homepage, its new logo prints “The Elizabeth Keckly Center” in cursive. A button to become a monthly donor now reads “Become a Keckly Burwell Sustainer.”
“The goal is not to exchange one history for another, but to hold these histories together,” historic site director Elizabeth Hays said. “The Burwell School is the place. Elizabeth Keckly’s life gives that place a remarkable connection to the national story.”
‘An act of preservation and an investment in the future’
In its statement, the commission said “years of research, discussion, and evolving interpretation” contributed to the name change. Steps to expand the scope of the commission’s research into the Burwell School’s history date back to at least 2018, when a task force compiled a 123-page study about the enslaved and free people of color at the school.
With the site now named the Keckly Center, the commission said it hopes to build relationships with historically Black colleges and universities, women’s history organizations, Black history and genealogy networks and researchers who study Keckly’s life and work.
A new identity is also expected to attract more grants, the commission said — key for a historic site that receives no federal funding. Hays called the name change “an act of preservation and an investment in the future.”
“Our responsibility is to tell the whole history — including where those stories inspire us, where they challenge us and where they contradict one another,” she said.
