Historic N.C. school gets 2nd chance at life, new use

COINJOCK, N.C.

Spry and gracious, 90-year-old Lorraine Perry can remember attending a small school built just after World War I - a school that still stands along U.S. 158, but with numbered days unless advocates can save it.

As a 6-year-old, she carried a flowered lunch box when she began making the half-mile walk in 1927 to the school for black children that had been built just seven years earlier.

In the winter, it felt so good to back up to the warmth of a wood stove inside. When it was time for class, Mrs. Black insisted her students go to their wooden desks and open hand-me-down books to the day's lesson. Perry sang in the traveling school choir. Her favorite subjects were English and geography.

"We were happy in those days," she said. "We didn't know anything else."

Perry said she is glad to hear that someone is trying to save the old school.

Last month, Currituck County had plans to tear the building down as part of a cleanup effort along the highway. Local historian Barbara Snowden, however, persuaded officials to stop the demolition. She convinced them that she and others could raise enough money to preserve the building.

Long-range plans are to create a nonprofit and gather donations and grants. In the more immediate future, she hopes to get volunteers to help fix the roof and board up broken windows.

"We've lost so many of our old buildings in Currituck," said Snowden, who was instrumental in preserving other historic Currituck structures such as the Whalehead Club and the old jail. "Rosenwald schools represent an important part of history."

Working with black educator Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald - then Sears, Roebuck & Co. president - established a fund to build more than 5,300 schools in 15 states between 1913 and 1932. In North Carolina, the fund combined with county money and contributions from local black families to build 787 schools - more than in any other state.

Today, 22 North Carolina Rosenwald schools are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and another 41, including the Coinjock school, are on a study list.

If restored, the Coinjock building would likely be moved and converted to another use, Snowden said. The only other Rosenwald school in Currituck is an apartment building in Moyock, she said.

Currituck County does not plan on contributing to the Coinjock school restoration, county Commissioner Paul O'Neal said. The county spent more than $500,000 to restore the school for blacks in Jarvisburg, built by locals in the 1800s. It is not a Rosenwald school.

When first built, the school sat along a narrow, unpaved two-lane road. By the early 1930s, the highway was paved in concrete and designated part of U.S. 158. Perry remembers standing in front of the school as President Franklin D. Roosevelt came through on the way to the Outer Banks.

"He waved at us," she said.

Perry, a widow for 17 years, spends many of her days at the Currituck senior center in Powells Point. One recent day, wearing a bright blue dress with matching earrings, styled hair and subtle makeup, she looked like she might be going to the advertising agency where she worked decades ago in New York City.

It was the pictures and lessons from her geography book in Coinjock that first inspired her to want to travel, she said. In 1938, after graduation, she left Currituck for New York City, where she met her husband. They went to Niagara Falls, a place she first loved as a mere picture in a geography book, showed to her by Mrs. Black in the Rosenwald school in Coinjock.

Jeff Hampton, (252) 338-0159, jeff.hampton@pilotonline.com