ARCHIVES - Venerable School Saved

[Editor’s note: This article was originally published on November 3, 2011]

As recently as a decade ago, some people in the Pine Grove community were in favor of tearing down the old, wooden community center.

Its roof and windows leaked. The floor sagged and was covered with old tiles laced with asbestos, making repairs dangerous and expensive. Some nearby residents pleaded with the Richland County Recreation Commission to tear the old building down and build a modern community center.

“We asked for it to be destroyed because it was old and raggedy and we could not keep it up,” Georgella Foust said. “We didn’t know what we had.”

Fortunately, others spoke up and prevented the destruction of the last of the Rosenwald schools in Richland County. And today, the Pine Grove Rosenwald School stands today as a gleaming reminder of an important period in American history, when African-American children first were given wide-scale educational opportunities.

Once the recreation agency realized the importance of the building, it started working on what for its members was a different, and joyful, project. It applied for historic rehabilitation grants, gradually pulling in nearly $250,000 to plan the rehabilitation, remove the asbestos tiles, replace the roof and windows and add central heat and air conditioning.

The finished product will be unveiled today at a 5:30 p.m. ceremony to be attended by many former students of the school.

Foust, 74, is one of those students. She, like all of the school’s surviving students, knew the school was important to them.

They didn’t think it was important enough to others that anyone would be willing to spend enough money to renovate it.

Pine Grove is one of 486 S.C. schools, shops or teachers’ homes built in the early 1900s with the aid of money from Chicago philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Co.

Prompted by a friendship with Booker T. Washington and a belief that a welleducated work force was crucial to industrial success, Rosenwald put up seed money to build 4,977 schools for black children in the South. The Rosenwald Fund pumped nearly $4.4 million into the schools, leading to private and government contributions of $24 million more.

Many rural African Americans in the state attended Rosenwald schools until the 1950s, when the state built new brick schools for them in the separate-but-equal era. Many of the old Rosenwald buildings deteriorated, burned down or were bulldozed.

Pine Grove, which was converted into a community center after the last students left in 1950, is the only one of 13 Rosenwald schools in Richland County still standing.

In 2002, the National Trust for Historic Preservation designated Rosenwald schools among the most endangered historic places in the country, prompting renewed interest in the old buildings.

The renovation process at Pine Grove started with a grant to determine whether the structure could be saved. That led to more grants – from Lowe’s through a National Trust program, from the state competitive grants program and from the Richland County Conservation Commission.

When one grant was spent, the renovation work would stall for months until another round of funding became available.

Nearly seven years after the planning study, the project finally is finished. For the final touches, the recreation agency scoured antique stores to find period desks, a wood stove, books and a globe. One desk and some of the memorabilia were donated by former students.

The building, on Piney Woods Road next to a new community center, will be opened for school field trips, for special programs during African-American history months and for gatherings of the former students, according to Zenethia Brown, director of community relations for the recreation agency. The recreation agency has plenty of gyms. Now, it has a gem, Brown said.

“It is different from what the recreation commission has done in the past,” Brown said. “The project is a success because (the school) is still here.”

Foust and her sister, Pauline Blocker Richardson, 87, said they are happy others see value in the building where they learned so much and had so much fun as youngsters.

“It’s one of the focal points for our community,” Richardson said. “That’s where we got out community started. I’m happy especially to keep that alive.”