After the Civil War, recently emancipated African Americans in Montgomery County sought education, building schools and educating themselves with help from the Freedmen's Bureau. Freedmen's Bureau agent Captain Charles Schaeffer helped establish Christiansburg School No. 1, the county's first school for African Americans, where two teachers taught 232 students in a room rented in the cabin of free woman of color Nancy Campbell. After the Freedmen's Bureau disbanded in 1871, the school expanded through the efforts of community members and the northern Quaker Friends' Freedmen's Association. Booker T. Washington later served as supervisor of the school, then called Christiansburg Industrial Institute, from 1895 to 1915, and its high school curriculum, modeled after Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, provided generations of African American students from Montgomery County and beyond with an opportunity for higher education. Between 1868 and 1870, schools for African Americans also opened in Blacksburg, Alleghany Springs, Brush Creek (Pilot), Wake Forest, and Lovely Mount (Radford). By 1940, African American students attended a one-room school at Piney Woods near Childress, two-room schools at Blacksburg, Wake Forest, Elliston, and Shawsville, and the multi-room Hill School in Christiansburg. Four of these schools were built with grants from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, established in 1917 to build schools for African Americans in the rural South with the guidance and resources of Booker T Washington and the Tuskegee Institute, and the new buildings at Piney Woods, Shawsville, Wake Forest, and Elliston were constructed through the combined efforts of the fund, the local African American community, and the county school board in the early twentieth century.