During the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, a freedmen’s community called Averyville was established in this area and named for Pennsylvania minister and businessman Charles Avery, a longtime champion of Negro education. Quaker missionary Wilmer Walton moved to Stevenson and Averyville as early as 1865 and opened a school financed by the Friends’ Association for Aid and Elevation of the Freedmen, and soon about seventy-five adult and child students were enrolled. Quaker missionary Henrietta Starkweather later succeeded Walton, but the effort to educate freedmen was short-lived as Ku Klux Klan violence, threats, and intimidation drove the teachers away by the early 1870s and the school closed. Averyville School’s most notable student was William Hooper Councill, a former slave brought to Alabama in 1857, who attended as a freedman and became a teacher himself by the end of his third year there. He moved to Huntsville in 1869, opened the Lincoln Normal School to train black teachers, and in 1873 founded Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University with funds appropriated by the Alabama Legislature to train black teachers. Councill rose to state and national prominence as an influential leader alongside Booker T. Washington and others, and his only formal education was at Averyville’s Freedman’s School, where seeds of learning were planted that grew into Alabama A&M University, educating thousands of students to this day.