Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 12 · column 1 of 3 · from the scan, no model involved
Scrabble School
From Page B1
schoolhouse in the 1960s, it remained a property of Rappahannock County. In the early 1990s, the late Franklin E. Warner, an alumnus of the school, established the Scrabble School Preservation Foundation to rehabilitate the building whose new purpose will be as a Senior Citizens Center, with dual use as a Heritage Center to educate the public about the history of the school.
History of the Rosenwald Schools
Guest speakers addressed the origin and significance of Scrabble School from several different historical perspectives. The presentations began with a discussion by landscape architectural historian, Jacky Taylor, on the importance of light and space in the small one and two-room schoolhouses represented by the Rosenwald Schools.
Most of the labor, the site, and over half the construction funds were donated by the local African-American community. About a fourth of those funds came from The Rosenwald Foundation as part of a nation-wide program to build over 4,000 schools for African-American children throughout the South. The Scrabble School operated from 1922 to 1967.
What one man could do
Scot French, interim director of the Carter Woodson Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, provided an intriguing discussion of the history of the Scrabble School itself. What caught everyone’s imagination was the amazing history of how one man—Isaiah Wallace of Woodville—pressured both the black and white community of Rappahannock to build a schoolhouse for “colored children.”
Wallace was a black laborer who traveled extensively in his youth and often traded his labor for schooling. As he traveled and learned, he continued to improve his status to more skilled labor and recounted the hundreds of homes he plastered when he returned to live and work in Rappahannock County.
Isaiah Wallace’s quest to educate African-American children was inspiring. When French told the group that Isaiah Wallace lived on Red Oak Mountain in the county, many people in the room exclaimed, “Oh, yes ... I remember who he was.” The fact that so many people still remember the Wallace family encouraged the UVA professor to seek oral histories of Scrabble School alumni in the audience to add additional details to this fascinating history of the Scrabble School.
95.2%