Rosenwald Schools

October 16, 2008

Rosenwald Schools

“Between 1912 and 1932, the Rosenwald school building program constructed over five thousand new learning environments for African American school children in fifteen southern states, including fourteen in Rutherford County.  The program was funded by Sears, Roebuck and Company president Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.  It combined contributions from African American communities with matching grants from Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Fund to encourage increased public funding for modern school facilities for African Americans.  Here in Rutherford County, for example, supporters of the Gladeview School raised $125 in cash, donated the land valued at $25.  For Holloway High School, black citizens contributed $1,500 and the four-acre building site. Rutherford’s Rosenwald schools included Beech Grove (1918), Blackman (1918?), Christiana (1918?), Dillard (1918), Gladeview, Lawrence Chapel, Locke’s (1919), Mount Pleasant, Smyrna, Bethel (1922­23), Bryant’s (1923-24), Dillard (1924-25), Emery (1924-25), Smyrna Consolidated (1926-27), and the County Holloway High School (1929-30)”.

(Heritage Partnership, ‘The Pillars’ Winter 2008, vol. 2, issue 1)

Cemetery Community School, built 1947

The Cemetery community is located in and around the Stones River Battlefield.   The old borders are along the Old Nashville Highway, Asbury Road, Asbury Lane, Willkinson Pike, Van Cleve Lane, Thompson Lane and over to the Stones River area of McFadden Ford and back down toward Smyrna.  Among others this area includes lands belonging to the Civil War Widow Burrus home and includes the site of Evergreen Graveyard.  It is thought that this graveyard started as a slave burial site and continued with land purchased by the community from Mr. Henderson.  The railroad, national park and New Nashville Highway are in this broad area.  The community included stores, churches and a school for the black community.

Mr. Percy Minter, a descendant of the community now in his 90’s, remembers going to the wooden school located behind his wife’s family home off Asbury Road and Old Nashville Highway.  It was a thriving community and a second school was built near the site of the wooden school.  The old school was then used as a kitchen to cook the meals for the students who attended.  The newer block school was built in 1947 and remains today, leaving a vivid picture of how the community thrived.  Boe Washington owns this school and the family land that dates back to freed slave ancestors.  Her father Anderson Washington was a leader in the community, musician and principal of the Smyrna Rosenwald School.

(Heritage Partnership, ‘The Pillars’ Winter 2008, vol. 2, issue 1)

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