St. George Rosenwald School: History, Restoration, Visiting

The St. George Rosenwald School at 205 Ann Street in St. George, South Carolina opened for the 1925–26 school year as the St. George Colored School and taught Black children of upper Dorchester County until it closed in 1954. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 2, 2018, and after a decade of work by its former students it reopened in 2023 as a community center, with a Children’s Museum of the Lowcountry outpost opening inside it on May 21, 2024. It is the only Rosenwald school still standing in Dorchester County.

What was a Rosenwald school?

Julius Rosenwald was president and part-owner of Sears, Roebuck and Company. Booker T. Washington ran the Tuskegee Institute. Rosenwald joined Tuskegee’s board in 1912 and, at Washington’s prodding, paid for six rural Alabama schoolhouses that opened in 1913 and 1914. In 1917 he set up the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and by the time the money ran out in 1948 the program had helped build 5,388 schools, shops and teachers’ homes in 883 counties across fifteen states. Roughly a third of Black children in the South in the first half of the century sat in one.

The model was matching money. The Fund put in seed money, up to about $1,500 for a school this size, on condition that the community raised a share and the white-run school board agreed to own and maintain the building. Across the program Rosenwald’s share was about 16.5 percent, Black communities about 19 percent (often in land and labor), white donors 4.5 percent, and public funds the rest. The plans came from Tuskegee at first, drawn by Washington’s students, and later from the Fund’s designers, Fletcher Dresslar and Samuel Smith.

South Carolina built roughly 450 to 500 of them between 1913 and 1940; the SC Encyclopedia counts 450, the SC Picture Project says 500, and sources differ. More than 74,000 Black students were educated in them. Most are gone.

How the St. George school was paid for

The building cost $8,300, which was a lot of school for a Rosenwald project. The Fisk University Rosenwald database and the SC Picture Project give the breakdown: the Black community of St. George raised $2,000, the Rosenwald Fund gave $1,500, and white residents of the town contributed $4,800, with the county school system covering the rest. In most Rosenwald towns the Black community raised the majority. In St. George, the white share was unusually large. Ralph James, who was in second grade when the school closed and now chairs the nonprofit that restored it, says the community’s $2,000 came largely from fish fries, bake sales and king-and-queen contests.

The building

It is a one-story, H-shaped, wood-frame building on the Fund’s Community School Plan for a six-teacher school, considerably bigger than the one- and two-room schools that made up most of the program. It had six classrooms and an auditorium; more rooms were added around 1935, 1950 and 1954. South Carolina Living calls it the largest Rosenwald school in the state. Even so, overflow classes met at Good Hope Baptist Church. The campus had a playground and a basketball court, and later a swimming pool the community built itself. The concrete shell of a bathroom building and a canteen survive on the grounds.

The school stood at the center of a neighborhood known in mid-century as Uptown St. George, or Little Harlem, a strip of Black-owned businesses across the street. Clara Dixon Britt, 101 when South Carolina Living interviewed her in 2023, walked about five miles from the Texas community to attend from fourth grade through her 1939 graduation.

After 1954

The school closed when Williams Memorial, one of the state’s “equalization” schools built in a last attempt to preserve segregation, opened in 1954. The building did not go quiet. Residents organized voter registration drives here and ran rides to the registration office and the polls. The Congress of Racial Equality held classes and meetings in it in 1965. From 1967 to 1969 it housed Project DEEP, the Dorchester Education and Enrichment Program, which prepared Black students for integrated schools. A Head Start program used it for a while; the mixed-color beadboard on the auditorium walls dates from those years, and the alumni asked that it not be painted over.

Then it sat empty for decades, under kudzu. The National Register listing covers 1925 to 1965 and cites both African American education and civil rights organizing. The school joined the National Park Service’s African American Civil Rights Network in February 2021.

The restoration

The Town of St. George took the building in trust in 2014 and acquired it in March 2015, with Mayor Anne Johnston, Sen. John Matthews Jr., Rep. Patsy Knight and the St. George High School Alumni Association behind the effort. Grants followed: $100,000 from the SC National Heritage Corridor, $75,000 from the Dorchester County Conservation Fund, $25,000 from the state Department of Archives and History, $5,000 from the Alice Rosenwald Flex Fund, and more; about a million dollars early on, “millions” by the time it reopened. Work began in 2017. Crews built a barn over the whole building, cut out the rot, and reused as much original wood as they could.

Two south-wing classrooms are furnished as they were around 1954. The auditorium has its stage, and there is a library with original Rosenwald books. In 2023 the General Assembly made February 28 Rosenwald School Day. In May 2024 the Children’s Museum of the Lowcountry opened a 2,500-square-foot outpost in four former classrooms, with a $300,000 gift from Boeing covering the exhibits and a year of free admission.

Can you visit the St. George Rosenwald School?

Address: 205 Ann Street, St. George, SC 29477. GPS 33.187041, -80.582721. About 55 miles northwest of Charleston, an hour by I-26 to Exit 77. The town clock and the Klauber Building on Parler Avenue are a few blocks away.

The building is owned by the Town of St. George and run by the St. George Rosenwald School board. It is used for civic meetings, events and museum programs rather than kept open on fixed daily hours. Check stgeorgerosenwald.org or call the number listed there before you come.
The Children’s Museum outpost runs field trips, camps and family programming; check its schedule for public hours.
The grounds are open to look at from Ann Street. The old canteen and bathroom shells are historic structures, not ruins to climb on.

Where this fits in the county

Most pages on this site trace the county’s story through Anglicans and Congregationalists and camp meeting Methodists. The twentieth century in St. George runs through this building. The county history page has more on the equalization schools and the 1950s; the dispatch /almost-here/ is set a few blocks from here on Parler Avenue, and the county map marks the school.

The children walked in from the Texas community and the Rosinville road, from places the county line had been drawn around without asking. The school taught them to read the maps anyway.

The St. George Rosenwald School: Six Rooms on Ann Street