The Freedmen's Bureau opened schools for children in the area after the establishment of Freedmen's Town. The Texas Legislature authorized the creation of public schools for Freedmen's Town by 1870. By 1872 most of the students and teachers who were at the bureau schools, which were closing, left them to attend the state-managed Gregory Institute, named after Edgar M. Gregory, an officer in the Union army in the U.S. Civil War and the assistant commissioner of the Texas area's Freedmen's Bureau. The school, which first opened in 1872, was the first school for freed slaves in Houston. Mike Snyder of the "Houston Chronicle" said that it was "perhaps" the first school for freed slaves in the State of Texas. By 1876 the school became a part of the Houston public school system.