Abandoned School Building in SC

Warrenville Elementary School, Warrenville South Carolina

Date added: September 24, 2023 Categories:

Main (north) facade, looking south (2001)

Warrenville Elementary School was originally known as Warrenville Graded School and sometimes now called Old Warrenville School. The school is located in the Aiken County town of Warrenville.

The mill village of Warrenville retains several buildings of historical and architectural note dating from the late 1800s through 1950, including the "stylistically significant 19^th Century mill with a tower that is relatively free of alteration, a management row [of buildings], an imposing school building, and an architecturally significant Methodist Church building". Warrenville Elementary School is one of seven school buildings in Aiken County designed by W. W. Simmons & Son, an obscure South Carolina architectural firm working out of Augusta, Georgia during the 1920s and active through 1951. Simmons produced his most notable designs in 1925 and 1926 when he provided plans for Langley High School, an addition to North Augusta School, Windsor School, Warrenville School, Montmorenci School, Talatha School, and Dunbarton School. His work in Georgia included design of the Administration Building at the Agricultural and Mechanical Institute in Cochran (1926).

The first phase of textile mill development in the South Carolina Piedmont was during the antebellum period, while the second phase occurred from the Civil War through the 1870s. Mill construction and associated village growth boomed during the third phase from 1880 to 1920, as management sought to provide new mill workers, fresh from the farm, with the necessities of life. These developments led to the rise of cotton mill paternalism, which characterized textile mill villages until World War II.

Between 1895 and 1945, economic and social conditions in South Carolina were fundamentally changed as industrialization transformed a traditionally agrarian lifestyle. Educational reforms that focused on compulsory education at the turn of the 20^th Century caused a great deal of political and social unrest between poor white workers and middle-class urban whites and between poor whites and blacks. This labor unrest continued into the 1920s and 1930s. Significant changes in industrial technology, products, and labor management characterized the final phase of the textile industry from 1941 through the 1980s.

Between 1900 and 1930, the State of South Carolina passed a number of laws aimed at improving education as well as educational facilities. The 1910 School Building Act, for example, required that buildings constructed with state funds follow approved design plans for small one-, two-, three-, or four-room schools. For larger schools, school districts were encouraged to use registered architects for design planning. During this period of increased state support for education, new schools were built across the state by some of the state's leading architects. After 1920, design standards commonly called for brick and stone school construction and certain key design elements, such as increased classroom size, greater classroom versatility, a more healthful atmosphere, and student safety.

During this period, mill schools in South Carolina developed separately from other schools and school systems, but were subject to the same design standards. Mill Village Elementary and High Schools received money not only from public funds but also from mill management itself. Thus, mill schools typically ranked higher than their state-only funded counterparts in terms of physical quality of construction and quality of education. For example, mill schools before 1920 were less likely to be one-room schools.

Mill owners designed their schools to instill habits of regularity, neatness, kindness, obedience, and self-control among the workers' children, who would eventually become mill workers. Management favored compulsory education, but not child labor laws, which prohibited the employment of children under the age of 12 after 1905. By the 1920s, most mill schools had libraries and auditoriums, which served an important function as community centers. Gardening, singing, domestic science, manual training, and drawing were typical mill school classes.

Under the paternalistic management system, operatives lived in mill village housing, made mercantile purchases from mill stores using mill scrip, attended mill churches and sent their children to mill elementary schools. Mill management created pressure to send children into the mills instead of school. Although their children were required to attend school until the age of 12, school attendance was not strictly enforced. School quality and length of term varied. Student-teacher ratios were high, often 50 - 75 students of various grade levels assigned to one teacher. In the early years of Warrenville School, graduating students received class rings in recognition of the end of their formal schooling, since they were old enough to work in the mills and could not afford further education after elementary school.

Before 1900, Warrenville was known as Aiken Station. In 1832, Aiken Station was a designated stop on the SC Canal and Railroad line, the world's longest railroad at that time, extending 130 miles from the interior town of Hamburg (Savannah River) to the port town of Charleston. The towns of Clearwater, Langley, Bath, Graniteville, Vaucluse, and Warrenville grew up along the original railroad line around various industries, especially cotton mills. Warrenville Elementary School was built approximately 500 feet south of the old SC Railroad and Canal Company tracks.

The Warren cotton mill and village were named after Charles Warren Davis, the first president and treasurer of the Warren Co., which remained an independent corporation from its creation in 1897 until 1918 when it was absorbed by the larger Graniteville Manufacturing Co. The history of the Warren Company is largely unrecorded. By 1903, the Warren mill was the third largest cotton mill in the Horse Creek valley with 32,000 spindles, 900 looms, capitol stock of $500,000, and a high credit rating. In 1907, the Warren mill employed 485 people and the village population was 987. Public buildings built from 1899 to 1918 included a school and two churches. The company invested $3,000 in the original school building, a frame structure located on the same site as the present Warrenville School. Operating expenses were shared by the Warren Co. and Aiken County, with the company contributing $350 and the county contributing $900 annually.

Warrenville Graded School was built on a four-acre tract in 1925 as an Aiken District school. At that time, the original frame building was demolished and its wood was used to build two mill houses on Timmerman Street. The building plan of the new school was similar to that other schools built during this period and included two stories with classrooms built around a central auditorium. In 1954, a one-story addition was built to house two classrooms and a cafeteria (Scardaville 1984a; Head 1992). No exterior alterations and few interior ones appear to have been made since that time.

The Warren Mill complex and village continued to expand after World War II. Between 1948 and 1951, the company initiated substantial village improvements, including paved street and sidewalks, and the construction of additional mill houses. Running water and indoor baths were added to all houses in 1949, and composition roofs were removed from all buildings in the village and replaced by slate roofs, except for the school which exhibits a built-up gravel roof.

In the 1950s, however, the Graniteville Company began to follow an industry-wide movement by selling its worker housing. Mill owners found the cost of mill village upkeep a financial liability once the traditional advantages of company ownership were eliminated. Workers no longer needed the paternalism of company owners as minimum wage laws initiated under the New Deal had increased their ability to own their own homes, buy cars, and increase their independence as they began to live further from the mill. In the early 1980s, the Warren Division of Graniteville Company closed. It reopened in 1985 as a dye plant for denim yarn. Avondale Mills bought the Warren mill from the Graniteville Company in April 1996.

When the Graniteville Company schools were consolidated under the Aiken County Board of Education, the company deeded the property to the Aiken County Consolidated School District for as long as it was used to educate area children. Warrenville Elementary School closed to students in 1992 and has since remained vacant and not in use. In 2001, the building and the four-acre property on which it stands were deeded to Village Senior Apartments, LP for rehabilitation as apartments.

Building Description

Warrenville Elementary School is a large, rectangular, two-story brick school building located at the west end of Warrenville mill village in Aiken County. The school occupies one-half of a block that also contains a vacant one-quarter lot and an armory building now occupied by Avondale Mills. The school property includes four acres and is bordered on the east by Verdery Street, on the south by Cloudman Street, and on the west by Timmerman Street. The front (north) entry of the building faces the Avondale Mills (armory) building. From its construction in 1925, Warrenville school was in continuous use until 1992 as an educational institution for mill village children. In 1954, two one-story wings (4,912 square feet) were added to the rear (south) and west sides of the building, creating its present C-shaped plan. Except for certain interior staircase and entry modifications and the modernization of plumbing and mechanical systems, the school otherwise retains its original appearance.

Resting on a concrete or cast stone basement and brick foundation, the original school building contains 18,008 square feet of habitable space capped by a built-up flat roofing system. The interior structure is of wood stud with wood floors and roof framing. Interior walls are plastered gypsum board.

The school's original brick and stone facade features baroque massing and is encircled by a full entablature and projecting cornice with a parapet above the roofline. The 1954 infill sections added simple massed brick wings on the west side (cafeteria/kitchen) and south side (two classrooms). This resulted in the creation of an open court on the east side between the original school building and the new south wing.

The main (north-facing) two-story facade of the school is defined by slightly projecting central and end pavilions. The central pavilion features four full-height brick pilasters beneath a Classical entablature. The entablature contains a frieze of four stone rondelles under a pediment featuring a bullseye window with cut keystones. A flagpole stands on the roof behind the central pediment. The central pavilion is approached by a wide stair with pedestal wall. Glazed, double-leaf entry doors with a multi-light transom are located within the bracketed pediment. Two secondary entrances on the main facade each have a single-leaf door and six-light transom approached by a stair with pedestal wall.

The projecting central pavilion contains three sets of paired windows above the central entry and one set of paired windows beside it. Both floors of the central pavilion are flanked by one bay of paired windows and a single window over the secondary entrance at each end of the facade. Each of the windows contains six-over-six light, double-hung wood sashes. All of the front windows feature cast stone lintels with raised keystones.

The original building's side (east and west) elevations feature four banks of gang windows containing six-over-eight light, double-hung wood sashes. Each gang contains six windows. Entrances on the first level are accessed by either stone or concrete side stairs and feature double-leaf nine-light paned or single-panel solid wood doors.

Floor plans of the original school building indicate a first-floor entry flanked by the principal's office, women's teacher lounge and boys' and girls' restrooms. Horseshoe-shaped corridors provide access to three classrooms and a cafeteria along the front and sides of the building and a large, two-story auditorium at the rear of the building. The building's second-floor houses six additional classrooms, two small restrooms, and the auditorium balcony.

The interior of the school building is accessed through a short entrance hall containing a double staircase to the second floor and a single reverse flight to a classroom entry landing. A balustraded apron wall at the top of the double staircase protects hallway corridor traffic from the stair opening. The original building's corridors and classrooms feature the original plaster, wood baseboards and wainscot with chair rail. Classroom ceilings feature the original crown molding. Classroom doorways are topped by a transom and have horizontal raised wood panels on the bottom half and six-light upper panels. Hallway corridors are pierced by hopper-style, six-light classroom windows located high on the walls to increase air circulation. Some of the plaster on the interior walls of the corridors, stairwells, and classrooms has been water and wear damaged. The brick walls, wood floors, wood wainscot, chair rail, and crown molding are, however, in good condition.

The school auditorium contains the original stage with a molded proscenium arch at the front and a balcony faced with beaded board wainscot, which also faces the entire room. Three banks of original wooden seating fill the auditorium.