By 1883, Liberty County maintained 53 schools, including 19 African American schools, with an average three-month term for children ages 8 to 14, but the only school for children in Dayton was near the settlements of Stilson and Fouts. In the late 1890s, the district hired its first African American teacher, Annie Fairchild Colbert, who was born in Houston in 1866, attended Houston schools and Tillotson Institute in Austin, taught at the Gregory School, and then married railroad porter Tony Colbert. Barred from teaching in Houston as a married woman, she moved with her husband to Dayton and accepted a position at a one-room shack, where she gathered her students and helped build an improved one-room frame schoolhouse near Luke and Prater streets. She taught Dayton's African American students until 1918, fostering the value of education among her pupils and in the community. That year the African American school moved to a site near Saint Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church until 1927, when the district built the Dayton Colored School. After that school burned in 1929, the district and community joined the Rosenwald School Building Program to construct a replacement for the African American community. The new four-room Rosenwald school was dedicated in 1934 and named for Annie Colbert, a pioneer in African American education in southeast Texas.