Elizabeth City State University-ECSU's Century-Old Rosenwald School
ECSU's Century-Old Rosenwald School to Take on New Role
By Melissa Stuckey, an Assistant Professor of History at Elizabeth City State University and member of the board of the Friends of the Museum of the Albemarle.
Nestled within the modern campus of Elizabeth City State University is a 100-year-old Rosenwald school building.
This modest schoolhouse, formerly located on Parkview Drive, was once bursting with activity.
Within its walls, student-teachers, neighborhood children, and expert professors of education fulfilled the university’s original mission of preparing normal school students for teaching careers in North Carolina’s segregated public school system.
Established in 1891 as Elizabeth City State Colored Normal School, ECSU has had some form of practice teaching on campus from its first years of existence in rented buildings in the historic Shepard Street-Road Street neighborhood through today.
After the university moved to its permanent location in 1912, practice teaching, like all other academic and administrative activity took place in Lane Hall, the first permanent campus building.
In 1921, desperately needing more academic space, the university began constructing buildings like Moore Hall, a spacious academic and administrative building, the principal’s home, and the Rosenwald School, a space dedicated solely to student teaching.
In announcing the new building program, the Elizabeth City Independent wrote that the practice school would “be in every way a model two-teacher country school, the building and grounds designed to be an example for rural school districts generally to follow.” It opened its doors on Monday, September 11, 1922.
ECSU’s Rosenwald school was built according to standard plans developed by the Rosenwald fund. This fund, established by philanthropist Julius Rosenwald in consultation with famed educator Booker T. Washington, was established to improve school facilities for African American children in the South.
Two hundred thirty-five such schools were built in northeastern North Carolina.
Among the thousands of children educated at ECSU’s Rosenwald School were children of alumni, faculty, and other neighborhood children whose parents could afford to pay the small tuition fees collected to help pay the expense of operating the school.
The small wooden schoolhouse served its purpose admirably from 1922 until about 1939, when it was supplanted by a newer and larger, brick practice school building, also constructed with the aid of the Rosenwald Fund in 1933.
In later decades, the old Rosenwald school building was used for many other purposes. First, it was headquarters for the campus YWCA.
It was then moved to its current campus location in 1957. From this spot, where it is now flanked by residence halls, it housed a cosmetology program, served as a laundry facility, operated as an observation laboratory kindergarten, and finally, served as headquarters for ECSU’s ROTC program for about thirty-three years.
Although currently vacant and showing its years of service through wear, tear, and some disrepair, this century year old monument to ECSU’s normal school past is poised to take on new life.
A $50,000 grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services has allowed the university to work with Raleigh-based Vines Architecture to complete a comprehensive interpretive and design plan.
With this plan now completed, we will begin drawing blueprints and, if all goes well, commence construction in early 2023.
Within a few years, the rehabilitated Rosenwald school building, along with the equally historic Principal’s home, will become the Northeastern North Carolina African American Research and Cultural Heritage Institute. Here, the university and region’s stories about African American life and educational pursuits will have a permanent home.
Photos: left - Girls playing in front Lane Hall in 1916, courtesy of the Jackson Davis Collection, University of Virginia.
Right: ECSU’s Rosenwald School building, courtesy of the Elizabeth City State University Archives.
Source: Museum of the Albemarle