The Bray School building, believed to be the oldest surviving school for black children in the United States, was loaded onto a flatbed truck and moved Friday to the Colonial Williamsburg Museum City in Virginia, which continues to focus on African American history, The Associated Press reported.

As many as 30 students, some of whom were free black children studying alongside the enslaved, were studying in the wooden structure at one time.

Hundreds of people lined the streets to celebrate its slow journey into the heart of a living history museum.

Williamsburg is less than 10 miles from Jamestown, which England founded in 1607. Just ten years later, the colony was supplied with enslaved Africans as labor. A century and a half later, black people, most of whom were still enslaved, made up just over half of Williamsburg's 2,000 residents.

The Bray School was founded in 1760 on the recommendation of the founding father of the United States, Benjamin Franklin, and named for the philanthropist Reverend Thomas Bray.