This building, adjacent to Scotts Chapel AME, was the Stevens Pottery School. I believe it’s now used as a social hall and Sunday School building.
Stevens Pottery School, Baldwin County
Vanishing Georgia: Photographs by Brian Brown
Since 2008. A visual survey of Georgia's historic architecture and culture. 9,000 locations. 30,000 images.
Well, we now have proof the school building was Stevens Pottery.
As part of its Virtual Vault, the Georgia Archives has a section, Historic Schools Photograph Collection. No explanation is given on the website, but based on what’s included (and what isn’t), Historic School Photographs are mostly early/mid 1950s photographs of buildings to be or that had been replaced during Minimum Foundation Program school projects for each county.
Here is our building, looking pretty similar to now.
https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/p17154coll9/id/607/rec/25
Stevens Pottery was wired for electricity, which wasn’t always the case with Black schools.
The Historic Schools Photographs Collection aren’t complete for the whole state, but document many, many, many school buildings long demolished.
Thank you, again, for sharing.
I am a bit of a nerd for Georgia school history, especially African American schools. Baldwin County is not a county I’ve researched well, but thankfully have various resources that can help narrow this down.
I think this school was simply Stevens Pottery.
I don’t know if Stevens Pottery is even marked on maps now, but it is/was just south of Coopers.
Since you narrowed down the area well, I was able to locate it on maps. From there, I’ll go through my methodology.
Street view indicates this building was block, a material not often seen in Black schools of the 1950s. That itself didn’t make it easier to identify the school, but makes me feel more confident that it would have been used longer as officials weren’t about to let it go to waste.
Baldwin County finished consolidating its Black, county schools in possibly 1956. That’s when the state building program finished.
The Georgia Educational Directory began fully listing Black schools in 1957-58. The year before, the directory only listed major Black schools. This was not one of them, unfortunately.
There are internet-accessible backups of sorts: Georgia’s Annual Reports of the Department of Education (which actually came out every two years). School names are not listed, but the number of schools are.
In 1952-53, Baldwin County reported 17 African American schools. Two were in cement buildings. We don’t know which two, but it’s a bit of confidence that this was a school. For the record, 13 other Black school buildings were frame/wooden and three buildings at schools were brick (two of those possibly on the same campus). Brick would have been Carver in Milledgeville. Northside, also in Milledgeville, would have been block or brick.
Baldwin’s not my best-researched county, but I know the names of 15 of the 17 schools from 1952-53. There is not a Scott’s Chapel on that list of 15, but there is a Stevens Pottery.
Baldwin had been making slight attempts to consolidate Black schools in the years before this and it would be unlikely that another Black school would exist this close to Stevens Pottery.
I have not attempted to rule out the ones of the other 15 I don’t immediately have a location for, but feel pretty confident this is Stevens Pottery.
Thanks so much for this diligent research. I was hoping you’d see this one 🙂 The area is very close to Stevens Pottery and the names (Cooperville and Stevens Pottery) are sometimes interchangeable, it seems.
Glad to help.
Your photos are such a great resource and you keep finding all these old school buildings I didn’t know still existed. That I can fill in a bit of info makes my day.
Another rural pre-equalization school still standing in Baldwin is Brown’s Crossing, which is on GA 22, going towards Haddock.