Beverly Allen (August 1859–13 July 1918), educator, was born enslaved in King and Queen County, the youngest of two sons and a daughter of Beverly Allen and Harriet White Allen, a midwife. According to family tradition, Allen's father worked as a slave on one of the Robinson tracts in lower King and Queen County near Gressitt. After emancipation, he became a hired farmhand in New Kent County before moving his family across the Mattaponi River to West Point. There he worked as a fisherman and oysterman. On 11 January 1870, the year of the town's incorporation, Allen paid the West Point Land Company $130 for a lot at the intersection of what are now Lee and Third Streets. The house that he erected there, no longer standing, was probably the first one owned by a former slave in that community. The Allen house soon sheltered a school for Blacks, taught by two white women from Boston who resided with the family. Children attended school during the day, and adults attended at night. In 1872 the elder Beverly Allen won election to the newly established town council and helped the school obtain an appropriation of $55. In 1874, after his single term as a councilman ended, the council reimbursed him $2.50 a month for the use of his residence as a school during the previous winter.

Beverly Allen assimilated his father's devotion to education. According to family legend, the elder Allen stitched up his savings under patches on an old coat, which he presented to his son in 1879 to help finance his education at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University). Beverly Allen graduated from Hampton in 1881 and returned to West Point to become the second principal of the public school for Blacks.

Public education developed slowly in West Point, and the school for Blacks received less support than schools for whites. Always crowded, it was moved a number of times to ever-larger buildings, settling early in the twentieth century at a site on Thirteenth Street. During Allen's thirty-five years as principal and teacher, the school offered classwork only through the sixth grade, and when the school was not in session Allen worked on the river with his father to supplement his meager salary. A dedicated and inspiring educator, Allen wrote to a former teacher at Hampton in 1906 that "the occupation has hold on me." Alumni who continued their educations elsewhere demonstrated that Allen's school had prepared them well.

In 1893 Allen married Alice Burns, a native of Augusta County, who had been adopted by a family named Cochran and had also become a teacher. They had eleven children, of whom five sons and five daughters were alive in 1910. Allen's father resided with them in the house that he had erected years before until his death in 1910. Beverly Allen served as principal until he became ill in December 1917 and died at a Baltimore hospital on 13 July 1918. He was buried in the local cemetery, later known as Sunny Slope Cemetery, in West Point.

Alice Allen continued to teach at the West Point Colored School until her retirement in 1939. In that year the school graduated its first high school class, an act that represented the culmination of seven decades of dedication by the Allen family and others to education for Blacks in West Point. Two years later a new, brick school building replaced the aged frame structure where the Allens had taught. In 1942 it was named the Beverly Allen School in tribute to the pioneer principal and, perhaps, to his father as well. It became an elementary school in 1954 and was closed when the city's schools were desegregated in 1966.

Sources Consulted:
Alice L. Reid, comp., Negro Leadership, 1870–1970 [1970], 4–17 (with 1859 birthdate, frontispiece portrait, and quotation in copy of 31 May 1906 letter on 12); Beverly Allen Student File (including several letters), William R. & Norma B. Harvey Library, Hampton University, Hampton; gravestone inscription with variant birth date of 1865 in Sunny Slope Cemetery, West Point; household and family data compiled from United States Census Schedules, King William Co., 1870, 1880, 1900 (Aug. 1859 birth date), and 1910, Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; family history verified by Allen's granddaughter Alice L. Reid (1991); King William Co. Deed Book, 4:420–421, 10:367, and 11:34; West Point Town Council Minutes; Alonzo Thomas Dill, York River Yesterdays: A Pictorial History (1984), 72, 82, 113, 175; Charles A. Loving, History of West Point United Methodist Church, 1869–1989 (1989), 10; King William Co. Release Deed Book, 1:402; obituaries in West Point News, 19 July 1918 and Richmond Times-Dispatch, 21 July 1918.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Alonzo Thomas Dill.

How to cite this page:
Alonzo Thomas Dill, "Beverly Allen (1859–1918)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 1998, revised 2022 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Allen_Beverly, accessed [today's date]).

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