Spared from demolition, 1920s black schoolhouse being saved
SAVANNAH, Ga. — As a girl in the mid-1950s, Amy Roberts would catch a ride each morning with her neighbours the Johnsons, the couple that ran the one-room schoolhouse where black children were taught on St. Simons Island.
“Mrs. Johnson played the piano and she had the younger children,” Roberts said, recalling her years attending first and second grade at the Harrington School on the Georgia coast in the years before desegregation. “We used to sing. We had to do a Bible verse that begins with a different letter of the alphabet every day.”
The old schoolhouse had been an anchor of the island’s black community since the 1920s. Saint Simons, a barrier island that’s now a seaside resort and home to more than 12,700 predominantly white residents, looked remarkably different when the Harrington School was new. Roughly three-fourths of the inhabitants were black descendants of slaves who worked the island plantations until the Civil War.
After integration came the school was eventually abandoned, fell prey to rot and was slated for demolition. Now, however, Roberts and other preservationists are close to finishing a seven-year project to restore it.