Slate Pencils and Stoves: The Impact of the Rosenwald Fund on Schools in Gloucester, County Virginia

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Before, After, and In Between: Archaeological Approaches to Places (through/in) Time" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The creation of the Rosenwald Fund in 1917 seems like a small event, but had a large impact on portions of the population. The fund helped rural African American communities in the South build over 5000 state of the art schoolhouses in their communities, often replacing old structures that were of poor quality and underfunded by county school boards. This paper looks at the impact of the availability of Rosenwald funds and the construction of Rosenwald schools in Gloucester County, Virginia. Using archaeology, historical documents and oral histories from two African American schools in Gloucester that built new Rosenwald schoolhouses in the early 1920s and two that did not, I will be looking at the structures themselves along with the kinds of activities occurring in and around the schoolhouses and if these changed or were affected by the new Rosenwald buildings.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Before, After, and In Between: Archaeological Approaches to Places (through/in) Time

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 636