Snow Hill Institute was founded in 1893 by William James Edwards, a graduate of Tuskegee Institute, which Booker T. Washington established in 1881. Its lineage extended back to Hampton Institute, where Washington and many of Snow Hill’s faculty graduated. The planter R. O. Simpson greatly facilitated the school’s founding by giving it its first 100 acres of land in increments of seven, thirty-three, and sixty acres, and he became the first chairman of its Board of Trustees. Edwards served as principal from 1893 until 1925, when he resigned because of ill health, and that period is generally considered the school’s Golden Age, when it stood in the forefront of the movement to improve rural education for African Americans in Alabama’s Black Belt. Snow Hill Institute remained an educational institution until 1972, when it was forced to close due to integration. Harry Sims, Ligon Wilson, Joseph Davis, Major Lightfoot, and Zack Z. Brown also served as principals during the school’s eighty-year history. Snow Hill Institute was placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the United States Department of the Interior on February 24, 1995.