Abandoned schoolhouse in South Carolina

Hope Rosenwald School, Pomaria South Carolina

Date added: March 05, 2023 Categories: South Carolina School

View from southeast with Exposed Rafter Tails and Chimney (2006)

Like other Rosenwald schools, the Hope Rosenwald School can trace its origins to the contentious debate over the education of southern African-Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the end of the American Civil War had brought about state-initiated funding and operation of some local schools for black children in the South, the policies emphasizing racial segregation during the Jim Crow era left southern blacks with few opportunities for a truly complete primary education and even fewer secondary school options. As black activists like Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois advocated for new black educational opportunities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of white northern philanthropists responded to that call by offering various forms of assistance. Often, rural southern schools in particular were a special target of northern philanthropy.

Among those who sought a method for insuring that black educational opportunities in the South might be improved was Julius Rosenwald, CEO of Sears & Roebuck and a trustee of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. At the request of Booker T. Washington, Rosenwald began a school building fund to benefit southern African-Americans, especially those in rural regions, and from 1917 to 1932, Rosenwald's program led to the construction of more than 5300 public schools, teachers' homes, and instructional shops in fifteen southern states, nearly 500 of which were located in South Carolina. One of the unique features of Rosenwald's program, however, was the funding requirements. The Rosenwald Fund did not simply pay for what the southern state governments would not; instead, Rosenwald agreed to chip in only a portion of the total project cost for any given school, based upon the number of allocated teachers for the school, provided that donations from the local community and-preferably-from the state exceeded the amount of the Rosenwald grant. At the time of the Hope School's construction, for example, Rosenwald grants for a school of its size (two teachers allocated) ranged up to $800.

Allocation of Rosenwald Fund monies continued through 1932, with the last Rosenwald school constructed in 1937, but by 1928, Rosenwald had already begun to limit the amount of funds available to rural schools because of his increasing concern that rural communities and southern state governments were depending on the Rosenwald Fund and their local black constituents to solve the problems in southern black education, rather than addressing the problem more directly and allocating more public funding for school construction and operation. While Rosenwald schools remained a feature of the southern educational landscape well beyond the end of the Rosenwald funding program, by the early 1950s, school consolidation efforts in the South-many of them prompted by federal litigation on the renewed questions of integration and educational equality, such as the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, case-led to the closure of most Rosenwald schools. South Carolina's school equalization program, funded by the 3% sales tax and bond initiative advocated by Governor James Byrnes during the early 1950s, was one such program.

The town of Pomaria, South Carolina, was one of those rural southern communities that sought help from the Rosenwald Fund. On March 11, 1925, the Hope Family-represented by James H. Hope (South Carolina's State Superintendent of Education at the time), J.J. Hope, and Mary Hipp, all siblings-sold approximately two acres of land from the Hope Estate to the Trustees of School District No. 60 for Newberry County, South Carolina, for the nearly gift-like sum of five dollars. In turn, the local residents, the county, and the state raised $2200 for the construction of a new school to be located on this land, with $400 coming from white donations, $600 from private black contributions, and $1200 from local and state government. The Rosenwald Fund then kicked in its own contribution of $700 toward construction. The school opened in 1926 and remained in operation as the principal source of public primary education for African Americans in the area until consolidation closed its doors in 1954.

The Hope Rosenwald School is a classic example of the Rosenwald Fund's modern Two-Teacher Community School design-in this case, "Floor Plan No. 20," which was designed to have its entrance and substantial rear window batteries oriented toward the east and west in an effort to maximize the use of ambient natural light in a manner that did not interfere with instruction. Architects Dresslar and Smith reasoned that light streaming across the students' desks and the chalkboards from the window batteries (as opposed to emanating from behind the students) helped preserve student eyesight and improved educational efficiency in poor rural school districts where buildings were unlikely to be electrified, while the large, double-hung windows on each side of the building allowed for substantial cross-ventilation. Buildings often sat on raised foundations to eliminate the problems associated with moisture and vermin. The moveable, pocketed center partition allowed for flexibility in the use of the two-classroom space.

A few years after the Hope Rosenwald School's closure, on January 23, 1958, the Newberry County Board of Education sold the closed school building and its associated lands to the Jackson Community Center and Cemetery Association Inc. for $500. Since that time, the local community has occasionally initiated efforts to restore the building to use as a community center, but it has remained vacant or served as a storage facility for the nearby St. Paul AME Church for most of the intervening years. Efforts are now underway once again to restore the building for use as an educational and community facility by local residents.

While the integrity of the nominated property remains largely and impressively intact, the present owners fully intend to remove a number of alterations (vinyl siding, a drop ceiling, boards over original window bays, etc.) that have been made to both the exterior and the interior over the years, all with the hope of restoring the Hope Rosenwald School as much as possible to its original appearance. In any event, the Hope Rosenwald School remains an important social link to the local community and a symbol of that community's educational past. Most importantly, the Hope Rosenwald School stands as an impressive surviving example of the efforts of the Rosenwald Fund to bring improved educational facilities, as well as creative architectural solutions to the problems of schoolhouse design, to rural African American communities throughout the South in general and in South Carolina in particular during the twentieth century's challenging era of racial segregation and educational inequality.

Building Description

The Hope Rosenwald School, located near the town of Pomaria, South Carolina, is a fine example of the "Two-Teacher Community School Plan" popularized throughout the South as part of the Rosenwald Fund school building program of the early to mid twentieth century. As with most of the smaller schools built during the "community school plan" phase of the Rosenwald program (1920-28), the Hope Rosenwald School may be loosely termed Colonial Revival in style, though its distinguishing architectural features are quite basic and unadorned on both the interior and exterior. Constructed in 1925-26 on land sold to Newberry County by the Hope Family for only five dollars, the Hope Rosenwald School served for nearly thirty years as the principal source of African-American primary public education in this rural community, until it was closed in 1954 as part of public school consolidation efforts under the Byrnes School Equalization program. The school sits adjacent to the St. Paul AME Church on Hope Station Road and is otherwise surrounded by grassy fields and pine stands in a remote section of Newberry County. Though "model" Rosenwald Schools of the period typically featured at least one detached sanitary privy, no such outbuildings survive at the Hope Rosenwald School site.

The Hope Rosenwald School's layout and general characteristics replicate "Floor Plan No. 20, Two-Teacher Community School" from the Community School Plans published by the Rosenwald Fund during the 1920s. The rectangular building is a raised, single-story, gabled-roof, clapboard schoolhouse resting on a brick pier foundation. The current metal roofing materials appear to be original to the structure, as do the small wood frame and sheet metal porch awnings located over each of the two entrances on the east face, as evinced by an undated, uncredited photograph taken sometime before 1952. Roofline ornamentation is notable for the exposed rafter tails, a common feature on smaller Rosenwald Schools built under the Community School Plan. As with all of the "No. 20" two-teacher Rosenwald schools, the Hope Rosenwald School is also notable for its three large batteries of double-hung, nine over nine windows-one four-window battery located on the east face for lighting the "industrial room," and two batteries of six windows each located on the west face and used to light each of the classrooms-all of which were part of a special design by architects Fletcher Dresslar and Samuel L. Smith to take maximum advantage of lateral natural light falling simultaneously across chalkboards and desks. An earlier, aborted restoration project (in which vinyl siding was installed over a portion of the east and north faces) has obscured the upper sashes of the east face battery, and a separate project has covered the outer two windows and the upper sashes of the four inside windows of the west face battery closest to the north face of the building with plywood paneling and other scrap lumber. Likewise, the upper sashes of the northernmost small battery of cloakroom windows on the east face (two double-hung, six over six windows to each battery) have also been covered over by vinyl siding on the exterior and plywood on the interior. Nevertheless, it appears as though these sashes may survive beneath these obscuring materials. Meanwhile, many of the lights (and some of the muntins) in the visible sashes have been destroyed, so that black plastic has been hung to keep rainwater and animals from entering the building through the resultant openings. In some instances, two-light sashes with translucent glass have been nailed/screwed in place of missing nine-light sashes, particularly in the west face battery closest to the south face of the building. Double transom lights over all interior and exterior doorways remain fully intact and operable.

The interior of the Hope Rosenwald School remains much as it was when the school was in operation. Horizontal, tongue-and-groove painted wall sheathing, stained wood molding, and vertical tongue-and-groove stained wainscoting (to a height of approximately two feet), exterior and interior paneled wooden doors, and tongue-and-groove flooring all appear to be almost entirely original and predominantly intact. The pocketed partition panel system located between the two classrooms remains intact, though the descending chalkboard partitions have been removed and stored in one of the cloakrooms for safekeeping. The original "industrial room" was converted to a kitchen at some unknown earlier date, so that old kitchen appliances and roughed-in worktables occupy this space. Two wood-burning stoves-believed by St. Paul's church members to be original to the structure-still sit near the stack openings to the single chimney between the classrooms and the industrial room, though the slabs on which they once rested have disappeared to theft. A framed-in drop ceiling of acoustical board was installed in both classrooms at an unknown date, and as part of the exterior vinyl siding project, many of the original tongue-and-groove sheathing boards from the original interior ceiling were removed and used as the anchor lattice for the vinyl siding, though it appears as though most of this woodwork is recoverable. Openings were also cut into the walls adjoining the doorways from each classroom into the industrial room, presumably to facilitate the serving of meals from the industrial room to the classrooms, and another shallow opening cut in the north cloakroom wall to accommodate a bookshelf. Otherwise, much of the original educational equipment, including installed chalkboards and portable chair-desks, is still in the building.