Rural Initiative Project, Inc.

The Allen Grove Rosenwald School & the 4-H Rural Life Center

By Angelo Franceschina 

Edited by Judy Cardwell & Keshia Horn

If you read Stephanie Duetsch’s article on the Allen Grove School, you can feel her passion about Cary Pittman who constructed the Allen Grove School in 1921 along with 30 other Rosenwald Schools.  I place Cary Pittman’s achievements with Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington as one of the most respected persons in the history of Rosenwald schools in North Carolina.  What makes the Allen Grove School special is that it is located on the 4H Rural Life Center.  The Center is over 300 acres and has a historic building in the County Home which is the edifice of the campus and two other buildings with potential for National Register status; a children’s playhouse and a 1901 farm house.  This does not include the Allen Grove School which is listed as eligible for the National Register. 

When I first visited the Allen Grove School I saw over a 100 young children actively involved in agricultural educational programs and recreation.  There was even a group of kids using the school for a class.  I was greeted by Joe Long of Agricultural Extension who has much passion about the Rural Life Center as I have about preserving Rosenwald Schools.  Joe designed the concept of a rural site were young people can experience “hands on agricultural education.”  The Life Center also provides senior citizen day camps, rodeos, preschool nutrition programs, an amphitheater, hosting harvest days and an agricultural museum.  Even with all the programs of the Rural Life Center, the buildings and site have been underutilized and their maintenance deferred, not for lack of commitment but a struggling economy.  Even with the struggles the agricultural education for the youth continues on.  

In my first visit I realized the restoration of Allen Grove School would be more than just preserving a part of our history, but the integral piece that can stimulate the revitalization of the Rural Life Center.  The Allen Grove School is in a visible location and its restoration could bring new energy to the Center.  Plans are being developed to restore it so they can continue using it for agricultural education. I would imagine that Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington would be honored by the passion that Joe Long and others have shown in their commitment to preserving the value education. 

The preservation of the School is vital to the growth and improvement of the Life Center.  The center for agricultural development in Halifax County is a place where farmers, wholesalers, retailers, producers and educational institutions can meet and discuss how to improve farming techniques and how their product can be better marketed.  A library has started but it needs to be expanded to include information that can assist the local growers and farmers.  Let’s not forget it needs to be a place where the community can continue to meet, socialize, plan programs and activities such as community gardens.  It is especially important for the many not just for the Allen Grove School alumni, but all of the lost Rosenwald Schools alumni, to preserve the memories and the legacy. We cannot forget what they have done for Halifax County.

©2011 Angelo Franceschina

Rosenwald Schools Matter!

By Stephanie Deutsch

“A community gathers outside its new Rosenwald School, Alabama, 1920.  Photo courtesy Tuskegee University Archives.”

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has a motto they like to use – This Place Matters.  I think it is particularly apt when applied to Rosenwald schools, many of which have, in fact, been brought back to life with help from the Trust — and from RIPI.  Rosenwald schools matter because these small, often isolated structures tell an extraordinary story about communities where people wanted schools for their children and the collaboration between two exceptional men – Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington – that helped get them.  For over ten years, I have been studying this story.

Julius Rosenwald was the son of German Jewish immigrants who arrived in this country in 1856, about the time Booker T. Washington was being born a slave in the hills of western Virginia.  Julius’s parents, like many Jews, left Europe looking for a life free from prejudice and from laws and customs that denied them access to higher education and many professions.  Julius’s father started out as a peddler and then became a shopkeeper, moving to Springfield, Illinois in 1861.  It is there that Julius Rosenwald was born, in August 1862.  He grew up in a house across the street from where Abraham Lincoln had lived.  Julius followed in his father’s and uncles’ footsteps and became a seller of men’s clothing.  In 1895, in Chicago, he had the opportunity to buy into a small, unknown mail order company called Sears, Roebuck.  He thought mail order was a business with a future and boy, was he right!  By the time he was forty years old Julius Rosenwald was a millionaire many times over.

Booker T. Washington’s journey was different, of course.  He grew up as one of ten slaves on a farm that is today a National Park Service site near Roanoke, Virginia, beautiful country that laterhe described as “about a close to No Where as any locality gets to be.” After emancipation, young Booker worked for a well to do white woman who encouraged his dream of going to Hampton Institute, a training school for black teachers in Tidewater Virginia. Washington graduated from Hampton, did become a teacher and went on in 1881 to found Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

When Washington and Rosenwald met in May, 1911 they hit it off right away.  Washington was always looking for wealthy men who might donate funds to support Tuskegee.  Rosenwald was interested in expanding the scope of his philanthropy and using his fortune to promote the wellbeing of black Americans. Both men were practical-minded.  When Washington suggested that, in addition to donating to Tuskegee, Rosenwald might help build small schoolhouses in rural areas for African American children who otherwise were without opportunities for education, Rosenwald immediately said yes.  The two men quickly agreed that the program would work best if people in the communities to be served made contributions as well – contributions of land, of building materials and of labor.

The Rosenwald building program began with three schoolhouses near Tusekgee.  When it closed down in 1932 it had contributed to the construction of 4,977 schools, 217 teachers’ homes and 163 shops associated with schools.  The black communities served by the schools had donated more dollars for their construction than the $4,300,00 contributed by the Rosenwald Fund. During the nineteen twenties, thirties and forties roughly a third of all African American children in the South passed through the doors of Rosenwald schools.

I tell the story of the two remarkable men who created this program and of the schools and their importance to their communities in my book You Need a Schoolhouse: Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South, due out from Northwestern University Press in December.  I hope I will have the opportunity to visit many of the schools that are having new life breathed into them thanks, in part, to RIPI! 

Read more about my book and follow my blog at www.youneedaschoolhouse.com.

©2011 Stephanie Deutsch