The circa 1915-20 Dawn School (Photo by Jay Paul)
The structure stands like a gray ghost in the woods, half-concealed by leafless trees. One trunk has grown into the overhang of the roof, swelling to embrace it.
The steps have rotted. The windows gape, glassless. But below the floorboards, the joists remain strong.
You can tell, even now, that the old schoolhouse was built with pride. Even love.
The first time Kimberly Morris saw it, she cried.
“This all just started as me tracing my roots,” Morris says. “Finding me. Finding out who I am.”
Morris grew up in Richmond. But every time her father took her to Kings Dominion during her childhood, he told her, “This is where I’m from.” She remembers perching at the top of a roller coaster, looking over the surrounding farmland and thinking, “Wow!”
Her father, Isaiah Morris, was born in the tiny Caroline County farming community of Dawn and lived there until he was 11. The youngest of nine children, he, his siblings and all his cousins attended the Dawn School. One of his cousins recalled all the children walking to school together, carrying their lunch pails, and playing outside at recess. “They were happy here,” Morris says.
With a lifelong interest in history, Morris began researching her family’s past. She credits her older relatives with sharing the memories that propelled her. Her father’s older sister, Alberta Morris Perkins, gave her the names and stories she needed to get started. Perkins died just two years ago, shortly before her 105th birthday.
Working on ancestry.com and in the Library of Virginia’s genealogy records, Morris “went all the way back to my great-great-great. All in this community,” she says.
She learned that the descendants of people enslaved at Meadow Farm remained nearby after Emancipation, in Dawn and nearby Duval. One relative told her about the schoolhouse, which led Morris to search property records. She discovered that one of her distant relatives owns the land where the schoolhouse stands, and he welcomed her to explore. “I didn’t have to go far to find it,” she says. “It was right here all the time.”
About a year ago, Morris nominated the school for Preservation Virginia’s list of Virginia’s Most Endangered Historic Places. Historic schoolhouses had already been named to the list as a category, but the Dawn School and a few others were highlighted as deserving special attention.
Kimberly Morris stands beside Mary Carroll’s portrait of her at the Dawn School (Photo by Jay Paul)
Preserving the schools would “serve as an important reminder of the history of Civil Rights in education and of the continual struggle for equal justice, as well as illuminating the rich history of historic African American communities,” Preservation Virginia said.
Inside, the two-room schoolhouse is bright. Two enormous windows admit the winter sunshine. A brick chimney probably was once attached to a coal stove. The large room was used for instruction, while the small one might have been used as a cloakroom or storage.
While it’s a simple, practical building, it’s also beautiful, observes Sonja Ingram, Preservation Virginia’s associate director of preservation field services. “Whoever built it, the people in the community, really took some extra time,” she says, noting the decorative wooden trim, the high ceilings and the metal roof with unusually long overhangs, which gives the schoolhouse a whimsical, storybook quality.
Its exact age is unknown. Ingram guesses it was built between 1915 and 1920. Records show that a school, maybe an earlier version, was constructed in the 1880s or ’90s.
Local governments of the segregation era were supposed to fund Black schools as well as white schools. This “separate but equal” doctrine, however, was anything but equal. Black schools often were nothing more than tarpaper shacks, with none of the amenities that white schools had.
Philanthropist Julius Rosenwald worked with Booker T. Washington to fund the construction of more than 5,000 high-quality schools for Black children throughout the South, including more than 300 in Virginia. Rosenwald paid a third of the cost, local government paid a third, and the community raised the rest.
While the Dawn School is not a Rosenwald School, it may have been constructed in a similar way, as a partnership between a local church or institution and local government. Research is ongoing, but Ingram believes most or all of the money probably came from the community. They were determined, she says, to give their children “as good of an education as they could possibly give.”
The school would have ceased operating in the 1950s, after desegregation. It was later used as a dwelling, perhaps until the early 1960s, and has been vacant since.
Preservation Virginia has covered the roof with a tarp to stop water from leaking in. They hope to obtain grant funding and work with Morris, the owner and the community to stabilize the Dawn School. Beyond that, its future is a blank slate.
Mary Carroll’s painting in greater detail (Image courtesy Kimberly Morris)
To bring attention to the project, Ingram contacted artist Mary Carroll (aka Mary Chiaramonte) to commission a painting of Morris and the school. Ingram believes that combining art with preservation could be a powerful way to inspire people who might not call themselves “preservationists.” After all, she points out, it’s “everybody’s history.”
Carroll, who lives nearby in Ashland, is known for haunting, dreamlike portraits, set in a world of decaying farmhouses and lonely highways, snarling coyotes and leaping hares.
She painted an arresting portrait of Morris as a teacher standing outside the schoolhouse, holding a book and dressed in period clothing. Morris represents the future, Carroll says — the hope of renewal for the building. Preservation Virginia may display the piece at Scotchtown later this year.
“It’s been probably the most meaningful commission I’ve had,” Carroll says.
Morris feels the same way. The painting was “the last piece of my journey,” she says. “She put me there, in that time. Not only did I discover my family, but Mary put me there, with them. It’s like all I have to do is turn around and look in that window, and they’re there.”
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