The Richmond Hill History Museum, in the old Kindergarten Building, is located at the corner of Ford Avenue and Timber Trail.
The Kindergarten Building was constructed in 1940 at the behest of Henry Ford to serve the white children (ages three to six) of Ways Station-Richmond Hill. It featured a kitchen and two classrooms. Dr. Margaret Mustin was the first director of the facility.
In The History of Brooks County, Georgia (1948) Folks Huxford notes that area around Hickory Head was settled long before the Civil War by families from Bulloch, Jones, and Houston Counties. The families were comprised of hard-working farmers who valued their faith and strongly embraced education. They were members of Liberty Baptist Church, which was established in 1841. A. W. Groover donated land for the establishment of a school in 1866, and in either 1867 or 1869, it was built with funds raised through subscription. Mr. Groover, alongside W. H. Stanley and C. A. Davis, served as the first trustees of the Hickory Head Academy. Edwin B. Carroll, who would later serve as pastor at Hickory Head Baptist Church, was the first schoolmaster.
A plaque on the building notes that it was used as a school until 1925. Just a handful of rural academies like Hickory Head survive today, so that alone is an important part of its story, but its association with the Hickory Head Agricultural Club is quite extraordinary, as well. Folks Huxford suggests the club was established circa 1885 and met in the schoolhouse. Member farmers became widely known for shipping ham and bacon at a time when most of the South was importing meat from the Northwest. Brooks County pork, raised largely on peanuts, was in great demand. Hickory Head farmers were also among the first in the region to use ice in the cooling of meat, coming from Maine by way of Savannah. With modern innovations, the club faded over the years, but was revived as the Hickory Head Farm Club in 1946.
The building has also served as a voting precinct and is still used by the community for special events. It’s had a long and productive history.
I believe this may be the earliest surviving structure of the Douglass School. The original school, with five classrooms, stood at this same intersection, but I’m not sure at which corner. Jack Hadley notes that this fine building served as “Douglass High School’s extended classroom.” It probably dates to circa 1910, or even a bit earlier.
When W. J. Varner served as principal at Douglass, he also served as secretary of the YMCA, and this structure became home to the first “Colored YMCA” in Thomasville. It appears to be in wonderful condition, and is now home to the True Vine Church of Deliverance.
Stevens Street Historic District, National Register of Historic Places
This landmark near the Savannah River has often been identified as Smith (Smith’s) Chapel, but further research indicates it was actually the Smith Chapel schoolhouse. Its architecture is typical for a rural schoolhouse of the early 1900s.
A 1989 Georgia Historic Resources Survey notes that the church was torn down at some point and this building was used for a society meeting hall. The sign someone added in recent years notes that the church was established on 28 July 1911. The resource survey dates this structure to circa 1934.
Old school bus seats used as benches or pews are a fascinating feature, something I’ve never encountered before. They wouldn’t have been here originally. Nationally famous outsider/folk artist Leonard Jones painted the sign in tribute to the congregation. His work on tin is widely collected. George W. Bush owns one.
The painting at bottom left gives an idea of what the church looked like, a typical vernacular church with a steeple.
This is the enigmatic Phoenix Academy, where Joel Chandler Harris attended school as a young man while working as a print devil for famed plantation publisher Joseph Addison Turner (1826-1868). It was saved and relocated to its present location in the mid-1970s by an Atlanta architect who owned the surrounding property, itself an historic antebellum plantation. More about that after a little background.
PLEASE NOTE: This property is not publicly accessible and trespassing is closely monitored by multiple means.
Phoenix Academy was built in the vicinity of Turnwold, northeast of Eatonton, circa 1860. The area is historically identified as Phoenix on maps. The house known as Turnwold today, the Lane-Turner House, was actually one of two on a large working plantation, the other being the older Alexander-Turner House. Joseph Addison Turner, published The Countryman, a weekly newspaper, from his property, the Alexander-Turner House. The Countryman was the only periodical ever published from a plantation during the Civil War and was widely read throughout the confederacy. His brother, William Wilberforce Turner (1830-1879), who lived in the Lane-Turner House, came up with the Turnwold name for the plantation, according to the National Register of Historic Places, and Joseph like it so much he applied to the entire property. (Turnwold means “Turner’s field”).
Union Academy, built circa 1820 by William Turner (1787-1853), the patriarch of the Turner family, originally stood on the site, but it was lost to fire*. Some time later, Phoenix Academy was built in its place. William Howard Seward, who served as Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, was an early rector at Union Academy. Joseph Addison Turner taught and served as president of the board of trustees for Phoenix Academy. He saw promise in a young, poorly educated Joel Chandler Harris, and encouraged him to attend school in the mornings while he apprenticed as a print devil for The Countryman in the afternoons. From his experiences among the enslaved people at Turnwold flowed Harris’s inspiration for the Uncle Remus stories. Though the Uncle Remus canon faded from popularity long before justified modern academic and social debates about controversial topics arose, mostly due to their rural subject matter and stereotypical portrayal of African-Americans, Harris remains a foundational figure in the history of Southern literature, if for no other reason than preserving the lost language of the enslaved and for his firsthand accounts of plantation life. A recent study found: Generations of Putnam County’s children, both black and white, have grown up with Harris, Remus, and Br’er Rabbit looming in the background of their lives. Yet in an age when the Harris books have fallen out of favor and Disney has permanently shelved the 1948 film version, nearly 100% of Putnam’s students engaged in this project acknowledge having never previously read a single Uncle Remus story.
*- (The date of the fire, and of the construction of Phoenix academy, is unclear; the National Register dates it to circa 1862 but also describes it as “antebellum”. I believe it may date to earlier in the 1850s and was assigned the 1862 date due to the Joel Chandler Harris association. The National Register also notes: “Over the years as the student body grew, a larger structure was constructed alongside the academy. The original Phoenix Academy became the headmaster’s residence until the academy’s closing, when it became a tenant residence. The second Phoenix School was torn down approximately ten years ago (c. 1965). Like many rural schoolhouses of the period, Phoenix Academy is of the Greek Revival style. It exhibits a pediment, pilasters with Ionic-order scrolls and molding around the door and window frames. The unusually fine application of Greek Revival details to one of the few surviving examples of rural antebellum academies in Georgia makes Phoenix Academy a unique and noteworthy structure.”).
Now, back to the story of how Phoenix Academy wound up clear across Putnam County. It’s all due to the foresight of architect and preservationist Earl McMillen, Jr. (1938-2007), who practiced in Atlanta and purchased the historic Singleton Plantation in 1968. When McMillen learned of the imminent demolition of the schoolhouse circa 1975, he acquired it from Putnam County and brought it to his property, where he painstakingly put it back together, just as it had originally stood. Its connection to Joel Chandler Harris was too important to be lost, McMillen rightfully believed. He did remove a rear wing, which had been added later in its history. It was used a rural schoolhouse well into the 20th century for children who lived in the area of Turnwold. An early 1900s photograph of Phoenix School, which the old academy was known as by then, shows that the school had a small front porch with a shed roof, but that was likely not original and was also removed by Mr. McMillen. I’m honored to be able to share these photographs, and am grateful to Dutch Henderson for the introduction, and to the Odum family for their generosity in allowing me to do so and for their continued stewardship of this important piece of Southern history. I’ll share more of their historic property in the next post.
This was served as the Brent schoolhouse until its closure in 1929. It was later home to the Brent women’s clubhouse and voting precinct. Brent had a post office from 1891-1904. It was named for Kentucky-born merchant Thomas Young Brent, Jr. (1841-1915), who moved to this area after the Civil War and married a widow, Jane Smith Clements (1836-1903).
Cherry Grove Baptist Church, like multitudes of historic African-American congregations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was as committed to the education of its children as it was to catering to the spiritual needs of its community. They built this little one-room schoolhouse circa 1910 for that purpose. In the Jim Crow era, there was little to no emphasis placed on the literacy of Black children by the state, so that responsibility was borne by churches. Philanthropic organizations such as the the Rosenwald Fund began building schools for these under-served communities in 1912, but Cherry Grove predates that time and is therefore an important link to a part of our history that is often overlooked.
Recent historical resource surveys have identified 15 of these church-supported schoolhouses in Georgia, and most can be considered highly endangered resources. They may have once numbered in the hundreds, so their loss is significant, not only to the Black community but to the historical record as well.
The Cherry Grove School, with one teacher overseeing grades 1-7, closed in 1956. This was an effect of widespread consolidation which saw the state building better Black schools, known as Equalization Schools, in an effort to delay the desegregation mandated by Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The school deteriorated with the passage of time, and was as endangered as all the other Black schoolhouses in Georgia. Thanks to the work of Barrett Hanson and the Friends of Cherry Grove Schoolhouse, this special place has been given a new lease on life and will hopefully serve a new educational purpose to coming generations. Their efforts saw the school placed on the National Register of Historic Places and were recognized earlier this year with the prestigious Marguerite Williams Award, given by the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation for the project that made the greatest impact on historic preservation in Georgia.
National Register of Historic Places
The New Lois Consolidated School opened in 1933 to serve students in southern Berrien County. It replaced the Old Lois School. I’ve had trouble locating much information about the Lois community, but it had a post office between 1882 and 1904.
Bryan Shaw writes: The community of the New Lois School was named for the daughter of the first postmaster. It was a sawmill and shingle mill town with a mill pond created by a wooden planked dam. The mill was built by William E. Connell, Sr. Lois also had a mercantile store, a gristmill, a hardware store, a church, and of course a two room school house. The 1908 Hudgins Co. Berrien County map shows the school district called Lois. Most of the children of the village and surrounding farms attended the school. A rail road line from Cecil once reached as far as Lois, until the dam failed to hold enough water back to operate the shingle mill and the gristmill. The town site eventually was taken over by the Georgia landscape, and only a couple of deteriorated residential structures exist today. The Lois School operated until 1933, when Berrien County consolidated the one and two room schools into the New Lois Consolidated School. The original campus was much larger than the remaining structure today. The auditorium and lunch room is all that remains and has served as the assembly hall for the New Lois Community for several decades. If you would like to learn more of the Old Lois townsite, you may wish to view the PowerPoint video titled “Ghost Towns of Berrien—Episode 1” produced by the Berrien Historical Foundation...
The old schoolhouse serves as the New Lois community center today.
An historic guide to Bleckley County published during the American bicentennial in 1976 identifies this as “One-room School House” and notes: This one-room school house was originally a part of the Bleckley County School System located on the Dublin Highway. It was later moved to its present location and used as a school for black children in the rural area. Though no formal name for the school is given in that document, the image matches the present structure. The name originally led me to believe it may have also been a church, but considering this information, Mae Chapel likely refers to an African-American church which was associated with the school.
It has been preserved by the Bleckley County Retired Educators Association as a representative rural schoolhouse and though a sign indicates that it’s a museum, it is not open to the public as far as I can tell.
This little gem was originally known as Alligator Creek Church but the name was changed to Bethel at some point in its history. The old Alligator Creek Church was built of logs and was replaced with this structure in 1872. Due to the presence of an African-American cemetery adjoining the white cemetery, it’s possible that Alligator Creek was a large congregation where enslaved people were members. It’s also known that the church served the community as a schoolhouse in earlier days.
