Late in 1933, Mittie J. Campbell was buried in the Conroe Community Cemetery on 10th Avenue, the tragic victim of a car accident; she was just 58.
Time and nature worked together to make everyone forget her. As the decades passed, the cemetery became overrun by thick vegetation; gravestones got knocked over and hidden – even the 2,000-pound stone that marked the plot of Mittie and her husband, Rev. Jessie Turner.
New generations of people drove by with no idea the dense patch of woods had once been the final resting place of over 350 men, women and children of Conroe.
In 2022, 89 years after Mittie was laid to rest, the magnificent Turner marker was restored to its original position by a team of volunteers in the Conroe Community Cemetery Research Project (CCCRP), a non-profit organization focused on restoring the cemetery, as well as locating and putting markers on every grave.
This past spring, 91 years after Mittie J. Campbell became a memory, the Conroe ISD School Board voted unanimously to name one of the district’s new elementary schools, scheduled to open in August 2025. Several prominent and praiseworthy individuals were considered, but the honor went to this woman who passed on so long ago.
Why Mittie?
During her abbreviated life, she quietly yet boldly broke barriers of race and sex, despite great personal challenges, becoming the first Black woman to serve as a principal in Conroe.
Early in 1898 and just two months after giving birth to her first child; she was teaching fellow teachers in a convocation of the Texas Colored Teacher’s Institute, about Texas history. Years later, just three weeks after her husband died the new widow was she was called on to teach other educators about instilling students with morals and a year later she demonstrated how to teach decimals to the intermediate grades.
In 1916, a year after her second marriage to Ebby Campbell, the manager of a wood yard, Mittie J. Campbell became the First Assistant in Conroe’s Black public school. The workload for Mittie and the other teachers was enormous: there were more Black students (459) than White (442), but there were 15 faculty overseeing the White students while there were only 5 faculty, including Mittie, for the Black students.
Mittie had her hands full there, functioning as the school’s only teacher of Grades 6, 7, and 8, all in Room 4. In that year there were 52 6th graders, 39 7th graders, and 52 8th graders – 143 students in the 12–14-year-old age group, but Mittie Campbell stalwartly filled the unenviable role, and her skills and excellent performance were being noted.
When the school’s male principal joined the Army, Mittie Campbell was promoted as the first female Black of the under-resourced, over-populated school. At the end of the school year, the Conroe Courier stated that there was much doubt about putting a woman in charge but, they reported, “she has made good” and the school had “its best session.”
At the end of 1918, a school building for Black students was completed and given the name, Mittie J. Campbell School, in honor of the woman who had worked tirelessly to educate Conroe’s youth, fellow teachers, and the community at large. There was still construction debt that the Black community was responsible to raise and Mittie Campbell was again praised for her leadership in fundraising efforts to pay the debt.
In 1927, the Conroe School Board decided that CISD schools needed to be renamed in honor of a Texas hero or a prominent Black person.
Thus, white schools were renamed the Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin, and the Mittie J. Campbell School became the Booker T. Washington. Mittie J. Campbell was no longer the principal and the school no longer bore her name, but her dedication and drive to teach carried on through the last years of her life, as she and the whole nation drove headlong into the Great Depression.
During the remaining years of her life she taught gardening, cooking, canning, sewing, and other survival skills to hundreds of impoverished Black families across East Texas as the nation fell headlong into the Great Depression.
Her love for mankind and education is most poignantly described in her own words: it was her way of “reaching the unreached.”
It is fine to name schools after famous people who seem to have moved mountains, but equally important to the history of Conroe and the nation are the names of those, like Conroe educator Mittie J. Campbell, whose every effort to “reach the unreached” and produce “worthy citizens” has shaken up and helped form the community in which we live today.
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