This Place Matters
By Stephanie Deutsch
You may notice that I’ve changed color — my site has gone from green to brown. This is to reflect the cover of my book which will be coming out in December. I have not yet seen and held it in my hands but I do love the way it is going to look.
Next week I will be in Buffalo, New York for the annual conference of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “This place matters” is the motto the trust applies to theaters and market buildings, train stations, private homes, banks and barns — the whole range of structures it has saved from decay or demolition because they are beautiful or useful or have a particular place in history. I think this motto — this place matters — is so particularly applicable to the Rosenwald schools the trust placed on its 2002 list of Most Engangered Historical Sites in America. These simple structures matter to their communities because they are proof of the extraordinary dedication to education they represent. They matter because they reflect the strength and unity of communities where people worked together and provided for their children. And they matter because they tell a significant story from American history. Even though Buffalo does not have the strong geographical connection to Rosenwald schools that Austin and Nashville did (both Texas and Tennessee had and have significant numbers of schools) there will be two sessions devoted them. I have been asked to speak about Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald and their relationship and I am very much looking forward to it.
And, thanks to Claudia Brown of the State of North Carolina Division of Historical Resources, I have found that there is, in fact, a link between the Buffalo area and the schoolbuilding program created by Washington and Rosenwald. One of America’s great though not well remembered philanthropists, George Eastman, lived in Rochester, not far from Buffalo. Eastman developed roll film for cameras and the lightweight, inexpensive Kodak that brought photography within the reach of everyone. Needless to say, this made him a very rich man. Eastman’s home in Rochester is a museum; the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester benefited from his generosity as did Tuskegee. Eastman had grown up in a family that disdained slavery and valued education and when he read Up From Slavery he immediately sent a large contribution to Booker T. Washington for the institute. Over his lifetime Eastman made philanthropic contributions of more than a hundred million dollars.
Eastman loved the woodland and fields of Halifax County, North Carolina where he had a hunting retreat. Each spring and fall, he visited Oak Lodge and he came to know the surrounding community well. Realizing that the black children of the county had little opportunity for schooling, Eastman deeded three acres of his land to the Halifax County Board of Education for a school and hired architects from New York to design the building. In a somewhat unusual arrangement, the Eastman school was incorporated into the Rosenwald school building program. In the early 1920s, it and two smaller schools, Everetts and London, were the first three schools in Halifax County to recieve funding from the Rosenwald Fund. North Carolina went on to become the state with the largest number of Rosenwald schools and related structures — 813. ( The state with the next largest number was Texas which, with 633, was well behind.) By 1926 over two hundred students were attending the Eastman school and getting hot lunches there.
The original Eastman school building is no longer standing but North Carolina is still rich in Rosenwald schools. I’ve written about Walnut Cove and Castalia, about Spring Hope and Princeton. Just a few weeks ago I was sorry to miss a gathering to celebrate the heritage of the Allen Grove Rosenwald School in Halifax County. My friend Angelo Franceschina, whose Rural Initiative Project has done so much work with Rosenwald schools, told me about it and shared the program. From that I learned about Cary Pittman, an extraordinary community leader who donated the land for the school and was instrumental in its construction. He was born in 1880 and, because there were no schools for black children near his home in that poor and rural area, he was sent at the age of 12 to live with a friend’s family in Enfield. There he went to the Joseph K. Brick Agricultural and Normal School which had been estabished in 1895 by the American Missionary Association with a gift from a Mrs. Julian Brick of Brooklyn, New York. Pittman earned a degree in Industrial Arts and became a master builder. During a long and successful career he ran a construction company, became a third degree mason and grand deputy of his lodge, editor of the Masonic News and president of the Farmers Mutual Commercial Association. He was one of the first agents for the Mutual Insurance company of Durham. He and his wife Almyra, a teacher who had also graduated from Brick, had eleven children and they were determined to see them all educated. Pittman became the moving force in his community, interacting with the Rosenwald Fund, pushing it for more schools. The data base at Fisk University lists 46 Rosenwald schools in Halifax County and one teacher’s home or “teacherage” as they used to be called.
Allen Grove, a two teacher Rosenwald school, served several generations of local children including many Pittmans and then for decades after the end of segregation it stood empty and neglected. But Pittman’s children and grandchildren and others in the community treasured their schoolhouse. They had it moved 7 miles to its present site on the grounds of a 4-H Center where it is part of the rural life heritage museum. The gathering two weeks ago celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of that move and the school’s renovation. It sought to “pay tribute to Cary Pittman and the African American families who devoted enormous effort to improving the education of African American children in the rural South during the early 1900s.” At a previous gathering there Cary Pittman III had said that “Education served as the pivotal point in Grandpa Cary’s life…Education is our most valuable wealth. This education legacy…got passed down to all of us.” The school occupies, the program notes, “a precarious place in history…between two major historical events that impacted African Americans and the entire country: the abolishment of slavery in 1865 and school desegregation in the 1960s.”
Writing for Viola Pittman Boone and Geraldine Pittman Clark, the two surviving children of Cary Pittman, Lauren Hamilton, a great-granddaughter, wrote, ”As you take this journey through the Rosenwald School, we hope that you will learn to appreciate the challenges this generation faced, their commmitment to education and what makes the Rosenwald School as relevant today as it was then.” Anthony Parent, professor of history at Wake Forest University, spoke and Clarence Bell of the Virginia State University Department of Music sang one of my favorite spirituals. It’s the one that the great Marian Anderson used as the title for her autobiography, “My Lord, What a Morning.” I so wish I could have been there.
I look forward to visiting Allen Grove Rosenwald School. It truly matters.
This article was taken from Stephanie Deutsch’s website, youneedaschoolhouse.com/stephanies-blog, with permission from Stephanie.
