Bartlett was founded in 1882 when the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad reached the farming community on the Bell and Williamson county line, and by 1912 a second railway had made it a shipping point for local farm and ranch products. In 1909, when the Bartlett public school built a brick schoolhouse, the district moved its existing six-room frame classroom building to this site as the first local school for African American students. After that six-room schoolhouse burned in 1919, Dave Johnson built a new one-story, four-room structure here using recycled lumber. In 1945, half of a building from the Goodeville school district was moved to the site for use as a shop and vocational agriculture building. The unaccredited school then went only through the tenth grade, and many rural students could not reach it, while few who did continued to Temple or Austin to finish their education. Parents and teachers, working through a parent teacher association formed in 1933, kept improving the school and in 1946 drew a dedicated couple from Prairie View A&M to Bartlett. Gentry “Prof” Powell, Sr. and his wife served as principals, teachers, and coaches, and with a school bus and driver provided by the district at the start of the 1946-47 school year, they brought in students from the surrounding area. By summer 1947, attendance had doubled to more than 160, the school had become an accredited 12-grade system, and with a strong curriculum and new sports programs it continued to grow before moving in 1949 to the north side of the city on Cryer Drive.