Duckett family. Like Fletchertown, Duckettsville was a community of small farms and modest frame farmhouses, and families whose livelihood depended on the railroad town of Bowie. Many of these families (the Ducketts, Dorseys, Brooks and Halls) attended the churches of Bowie or of nearby Pleasant Grove. Duckettsville children attended the model school on the campus of the Bowie Normal and Industrial School (now Bowie State University) until a Rosenwald-funded school was built in the community in 1922. At the same time a school was built in Fletchertown for the children of that community. By the mid-twentieth century, Fletchertown remained a small rural village; however, residents soon began selling off portions of their property and new houses were constructed in the community. Development continued in the late twentieth century. Both Fletchertown and Duckettsville offer a glimpse into the rural black communities early in the previous century. Most of the original housing stock is now gone, although each community still includes a few examples of the typical early frame I-House dwellings. Fletchertown is gradually being constricted by the construction of largescale subdivision houses on both the north and west; Duckettsville is framed by landfill expansion on the east and by construction of subdivision housing on the south.
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Fletchertown Rosenwald School Site 13016 Old Fletchertown Road 1900–2000
The Fletchertown School in the 1990s, long after it was converted to a residence.
Before the 1920s, the children of Fletchertown had no school of their own, but walked to the school for black children on Horsepen Hill one mile to the northeast. When the Horsepen school became overcrowded and deteriorated, the residents of Fletchertown petitioned the Board of Education for a new school. The Board proposed building one school to serve Fletchertown and Duckettsville. However residents of both communities protested the combination, and by June 1921 the board recommended the construction of two schools, one in Fletchertown and one in Duckettsville. Trustees were appointed for the Fletchertown school, and one of them, Lawrence Hawkins (nephew of Gabriel Fletcher, one of the first residents of Fletchertown), sold to the Board of Education one acre on which to erect the schoolhouse. Construction of the Fletchertown School (Colored School 4 in Election District 14) was partially supported by Rosenwald funds, and the school opened in 1922; at the same time a similar school, also supported by Rosenwald funds, was built in Duckettsville (Colored
FLETCHERTOWN African-American Historic and Cultural Resources
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