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This two-story gable-roofed brick building, now isolated on MS 17, was at the center of Richland, a prosperous agricultural community before the Civil War. Chartered as the Eureka Masonic College, its academic program never reached beyond high school level. It is thought that the principal, Rob Morris, founded the Order of the Eastern Star, a Masonic organization for women, in 1850. Exhibiting a faint Federal style, the 30 × 60-foot building has two classrooms downstairs, separated by a center-hall, and a single assembly room upstairs. After the Civil War, the academy was forfeited to the government and reopened as a public school for African American children. It finally closed in the 1950s following school consolidation. The Order of the Eastern Star soon acquired the property and has restored the schoolhouse as a historic shrine.