For nearly 50 years after St. John Elementary School closed in Albemarle County, its story was largely unknown outside of its alumni or people in the church and community in Cobham.
After the school closed in 1954 due to low attendance, a family moved into the building and reconfigured it into a home. St. John Baptist Church, which is located next to the school, purchased the property in 2003 from a private owner with plans to use its parking lot after the church completed an enlargement and renovation project.
Once the church addition and parking lot were complete, “the school was sitting there in the middle of it, looking shabby,” recalled Rebecca “Becky” Kinney, a lifelong member of St. John church who also attended St. John Elementary School as a child. “And so people would talk, and the church members were asking, ‘What are you all going to do with the school?’”
Over time, members of the church learned about the school building’s history and discovered that it was a Rosenwald School for Black children when it opened during the 1922-1923 school year. Rosenwald Schools were the brainchild of businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and educator Booker T. Washington, a founder and the first president of Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama.
“From 1912 to 1932, a collaboration between Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald resulted in more than 5,300 schools, shop buildings and teacher housing being constructed for rural African Americans in the South,” according to Saving St. John School and the Rosenwald School Legacy, a virtual program hosted in 2022 by the University of Virginia. Kinney and Joseph “Jody” Lahendro, a former UVA facilities management and preservation architect, described the history and legacy of St. John Elementary School in the UVA program.
In many locations, Rosenwald Schools were the only schools that Black children could attend. In Virginia, 382 Rosenwald buildings were constructed in 86 counties and four cities between 1917 and 1932, according to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, which featured an exhibition about Rosenwald Schools that ended in April.
After many long hours, hard work and dozens of fundraisers, Kinney helped lead an effort that transformed the school into St. John Family Life and Fitness Center to help meet modern-day community needs while preserving the school’s history.
A century of history, and a new path forward emerges
St. John Elementary School sits about 13 miles northeast of Charlottesville. After the Civil War, land was “parceled out and sold to newly-freed African Americans who built homes, businesses and churches along St. John Road, Louisa Road and Gordonsville Road,” according to ArcGIS StoryMaps, a map-sharing app that uses narrative text and other multimedia for storytelling.
St. John Elementary school was not the first school Black children attended in Cobham. The area’s former school was little more than a one-room wooden building with one door and no visible windows, based on a 1923 photograph from The Daily Progress shown during the UVA virtual program. The newspaper describes the St. John Elementary School for Negro students as “an antiquated frame structure” with all grades taught by one teacher.
When the new St. John school opened 58 years after the Civil War ended, Kinney’s mother, Sarah Ellen Douglas Bowler, attended the school. So did Kinney and her siblings, Virginia, Archie and Robert, before the school closed in 1954.
“At that time, St. John’s students were sent to another segregated school in Albemarle County, as Virginia engaged in massive resistance to school integration for several years after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision,” according to the school’s history on its website. “In the early 1960’s, Albemarle County Public Schools were integrated, finally putting an end to racial segregation.”
After learning the history of St. John Elementary School, St. John church members still were uncertain about what to do with the school. A 2009 reunion of about 75 of the school’s alumni helped them construct a plan.
Kinney, 79, described the festive three-day gathering that included a picnic, lots of storytelling and representatives from Preservation Virginia who recorded stories shared by the school’s alumni. Their stories are on the restored building’s website.
Alumni were asked what they wanted the school, which sits on two acres, to become. Most of them said that they wanted “some type of community center,” said Kinney. “Whether it’s for the elderly or whether to have it continue to reflect the legacy of education and community.”
Soon after, a committee was formed, and Rev. Kelvin Hawkins, pastor of St. John Church, asked Kinney to lead the effort to restore the building as a place to serve everyone in the community. Kinney, who’d worked in planning and budgeting for the Department of Defense for 30 years before she retired in 2002, eagerly accepted.
“I just knew that I was supposed to do something with that school,” Kinney repeated during several telephone interviews and a recent visit to the school. “But I also had enough sense to know that you don’t go and tell the leaders of a church your vision unless it’s already been given to them.”
Twenty years after its purchase, the former St. John Elementary School was renamed the St. John Family Life and Fitness Center. Its grand opening was celebrated just two weeks before Thanksgiving in 2023, marking a century since the opening of the Albemarle County Rosenwald School.
The celebration was the culmination of long hours, hard work and a lot of money, Hawkins and Kinney agree.
“Restoring a building can cost as much as building a new one,” Hawkins said recently while showing a visitor the 1,300 square-feet facility. He estimated that restoring the building cost $500,000.
Finding support for the restoration effort
Because the St. John Family Life and Fitness Center obtained its nonprofit status in 2011, it was able to secure thousands of grant dollars at the federal, state and local levels. For example, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources awarded the center $138,480 from its Virginia, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Historic Preservation Fund for the 2024 fiscal year. The General Assembly established the Virginia BIPOC Historic Preservation Fund in April 2022 to protect and support the Commonwealth’s historically underserved and underrepresented communities, as well as the cultural and historical sites associated with them.
In addition, the center received two African American Civil Rights Grants from the National Park Service. The grants helped pay to stabilize the building’s foundation and install a heating and cooling system. They also helped pay for carpentry, plumbing, insulation, and electrical work.
The school is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the Virginia Landmarks Register and has a state highway marker on St. John Road in Albemarle County that explains why St. John Elementary School was built and how it was funded. According to the marker, the building was constructed in 1920 and received $700 from the Rosenwald Fund. The local African American community provided $400, and the white community, $100. The Albemarle County school board matched the donations with another $1,200, the marker reads.
When Kinney and her family attended the school, there were no bathrooms. Instead, outhouses were used by students and teachers. Years later, before the church purchased the school, a fire destroyed the dwelling’s kitchen, said Kinney. In restoring the school, much of the school’s original layout, including its exterior wood lap siding, had to be restored. So did the original hardwood flooring, heavy doors and one of the two blackboards.
Yet, several modern features include two state-of the art restrooms, and an efficient kitchen. A small deck in back of the kitchen overlooks the St. John church cemetery.
In addition to the BIPOC and National Park Service grants, individual sponsors, corporations and nonprofit organizations helped restore the building, including Preservation Piedmont, the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation and the Building Goodness Foundation.
Also, the name of at least one contributing group known throughout the world is located on a patio adjacent to the building. Upon close inspection, visitors may notice “Bama Works Fund The Dave Matthews Band” written on a brick. The band’s fund is administered by the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation.
Other donations were pro bono from contributors such as Lahendro, the former UVA preservation architect and facilities manager, and Niya Bates, a PhD candidate in History who is pursuing a certificate in African American Studies at Princeton University. They were among the historians and researchers who assisted with the St. John school project, said Kinney.
Lahendro ran his own architecture firm specializing in preservation and restoration before coming to UVA. After he retired from the university a few years ago, he started to learn about African American historic schools.
“And so, I, at that time, dedicated myself in retirement to providing pro bono services to small nonprofits with African American historic sites,” Lahendro said. ” That’s why I’m deeply involved with so many different historic schools and churches.”
Besides St. John school, Lahendro has written grants and donated services for Rosenwald Schools in Cumberland, Charles City and Louisa counties, he said.
Bates grew up in Albemarle County and graduated from UVA with degrees in African and African American Studies and Architectural History. Long active in local and state Black cultural heritage projects, she helped the St. John Foundation conduct preliminary research in restoring the school and wrote the nomination to secure its National Register of Historic Places designation.
Preserving these spaces gives us the opportunity not just to save the things that are old because they’re old, but to save them because they are valuable parts of our American history. And they teach us things about different periods of our history that would otherwise be missed
– NIYA BATES, PHD CANDIDATE IN HISTORY, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
For Bates, whose grandmother attended St. John Elementary School, her purpose has many layers, which includes restoring her grandparents’ home in Scuffletown in nearby Orange County.
Preserving schools such as St. John are important given that just 2 to 3% of such sites
are recognized as part of the National Register of Historic Places, according to Bates and other sources such as the Equal Justice Initiative and Trust for Public Land.
“In recent years, there’s been a lot of reductive pressure on our community to forgive and forget without acknowledging all of the things that our ancestors persevered through in order for us to be here,” said Bates. “Preserving these spaces gives us the opportunity not just to save the things that are old because they’re old, but to save them because they are valuable parts of our American history. And they teach us things about different periods of our history that would otherwise be missed — things like the Reconstruction era or what it was like for Black soldiers to return from World War I and World War II and still not experience equality in the United States.
“These sites give us an opportunity to talk about what segregated education was like in buildings that were at the time, the height of architectural design in the Tuskegee-Rosenwald plan,” Bates continued. “It gives us the opportunity to celebrate the power that Black churches had in our communities, as places for Black families and Black people to come together and to organize politically and socially, and it gives us spaces that are critical to understanding who we are for future generations.”
A new community resource takes shape
Hawkins recently stood in the center’s small front room that serves as a museum and library. One wall features a large display of images and photographs of the school’s past. Among the donated items is a book about Countee Cullen, the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance poet. In a glass-display cabinet sits another book, “You Need A Schoolhouse,” by Stephanie Deutsch. It relays the story of Rosenwald and Washington’s school building project.
Hawkins reiterated that St. John and other Rosenwald-Washington schools represent the beginning of the educational movement for Blacks in the early 1900s.
“Visitors to the school, including young educators, now have a glimpse of what it was like,” he said, referencing the St. John Family Life and Fitness Center. “I believe that Rosenwald Schools often were used as community meeting spaces, and so now we’ve kind of reinvented the wheel by using it as a community meeting space for birthdays, health fairs and Black History Month events.”
An added bonus for the center is the gift of a generator that ensures community members have somewhere to gather during electrical outages.
“We’re in operation for the community, and it’s not just the Black community,” said Hawkins. “This is where anyone can come and take care of their essential needs if there’s no power.”
Kinney smiled, her face aglow with memories of attending school in the building. She glanced at the huge display wall in the library/museum and pointed to a photo of two 6-year-old girls. “That’s me and my best friend,” she chuckled.
Other memories spilled forth as if it were yesterday: One teacher who taught all the classes from grades 1-6. A wall partition that divided the room into separate classrooms. Students learning their alphabet and solving math problems. Teachers who were stern but fair. Fun and games during recess.
Although the St. John Family Life and Fitness Center does not have a full-time employee, it hopes to hire a part-time employee in the near future. Meanwhile, the center has raised funds for exercise equipment to complement its weekly exercise classes, and it plans to continue to seek funds for future programs and events similar to the Community Health and Safety Fair it hosted in September 2024, said Kinney.
During the fair, sessions focused on women’s health, heart health, mental health, fitness and financial health. There also was a session for the elderly community members that focused on fraud awareness, said Kinney.
Such programs, especially those involving diet and exercise, are important, she added.
“We have a lot of health issues in our community that relate to addiction, behavior, diet and lack of awareness. We want to make sure that people can live more prosperous and healthy lifestyles.”
Now that the center is open, Kinney sees more opportunities to secure donations from private companies and corporations that have more diverse funding strategies. Those funds will be used to pay a part-time employee for the center and a consultant who can identify the proper mobile fitness equipment to purchase that can be stored during other events at the center. Additional funds will cover the building’s general maintenance and upkeep.
As for herself, Kinney, who turns 80 in September, has no plans to slow down. She intends to join the Center for Nonprofit Excellence (CNE), a Charlottesville Area Community Foundation partner, to further develop her fundraising skills by diving into its databases to research grants. And she is grateful for Althea Lewis, of Lewis Grant Writing Services in Wilmington, N.C., who helped write many of the center’s grants and has taught her much about the process. She also gives credit to the family fitness center’s board for their long hours and hard work in making the restoration a reality.
When asked what other nonprofits can do when taking on similar projects, “be patient,” Kinney advises them.
“For us, as you can see, it didn’t happen overnight,” she said. “You have to be firm in your commitment as to what you want to do, and just because it doesn’t happen right away doesn’t mean that it won’t happen.”
