The Bethesda school is the oldest surviving primary school for black children
in the county, says Morrill. It was built, as best anyone can tell, around 1899.
Local legend suggests that it was built by a prosperous black farmer named John
Young. The school was apparently well used because a second wing was added,
forming the T-plan building that exists today.
In the 1940s, the school was closed as part of a program of consolidation,
according to a landmarks commission report. For the next 20 years it remained a
focus of community social gatherings.
The one-story school fell into disuse in the 1960s, and it's been
deteriorating ever since. It sits on brick piers and has a small front porch
that opens onto a 1-acre lot. It features large windows, long boarded up, that
let light into a building without electricity. Outside, a hand pump can be found
amid high grass. Train tracks run to the east, a paved country road to the west.
Morrill says the school is an important artifact of history showing how black
children were educated in the years before schools were integrated. There are
only a handful of rural schoolhouses surviving in Mecklenburg County.
The school property is now under contract, but the Kings have agreed to
donate the school building to the landmarks commission. "We've always wanted to
save it," Elizabeth King says. The commission will have until Dec. 31 to move
the building to a new site.
Morrill says it will cost $150,000 to move the school and even more to partly
restore it. The commission will fund the project with money from its $9 million
"revolving fund."
Typically, the commission uses money from the fund to restore buildings that
the commission then sells to replenish the fund. This will be the first time the
commission uses fund money to restore a building that it has no intention of
re-selling. "We wouldn't be doing this if the commissioners didn't feel strongly
about it," Morrill says.
The commission must still receive approval from the Mecklenburg County Park and
Recreation Department to move the school to Rural Hill, a 265-acre park on
the site of a former plantation. The site contains ruins of an old plantation
house, as well a one-room schoolhouse where white children were educated.
Keets Taylor, interim executive director of the farm, says there was once a
school for black children on the plantation though no one knows where it was.
Moving the Bethesda school to Rural Hill would preserve its rural character and
return a black school to the plantation.
Morrill's plan is for the school to become a historic center, interpreted by
members of the Catawba Valley Scottish Society, as part of Rural Hill. Keets says the society is "extremely interested" in the proposal but is waiting
to hear from the park and recreation department. A meeting has been set for
August.
"All indications are positive," Morrill says.
