Monroe Preston has had a long and lasting connection to the old Glade Spring School.
He grew up in the small Washington County town of Glade Spring, population 1,367, in a house right next to the school. Before he was old enough to enroll as a student there, he would wander over to play with his cousins during recess.
Sometimes he even went into the classrooms, where he was given a piece of paper and pencil so he could draw while the others were in class.
And he has a memory of being put in the corner for some small transgression he has long forgotten.
“Later on in my life, I would tell people that the school served as my babysitter long before I started school,” Preston said. “That was my playground. You know, I probably spent more time in the school lot than I did in my own backyard. It was my big playground.”
The four-room wooden school with two teachers opened in 1922 in the segregated South and closed in 1965 when local schools were desegregated. In those 43 years, it was the elementary school attended by the town’s Black children in first through seventh grades.
More than 100 years after it opened, the school is being recognized with a historical marker approved in December by the Virginia Board of Historic Resources. Some of its former students hope the attention will lead to the building being repurposed.
Preston, who now lives in Farmville, was a student at the school from 1957 to 1964. The next year, he was bused to Bristol to attend Douglass School, which was for Black pupils from eighth to 12th grades. But he only went there for one year. The following year brought desegregation, and he was among the first class of Black students to attend Patrick Henry High School in Glade Spring.
Once the schools were no longer segregated, the Glade Spring School closed and later reopened as a community center, where Preston worked for a time.
In 2021, he started thinking about doing something so people would remember the school, particularly since it would be 100 years old in 2022.
At some point, the idea to pursue a historical marker came to Preston, but it didn’t stick until he and his cousin toured the route taken during the Freedom Ride bus trips in the 1960s, and discovered that many of the cities had historical markers.
Preston then got serious about working toward getting a marker through the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. He started researching the school and talking to other town residents about his plan.
He told a friend who had some experience with applying for the markers what he was trying to do, and he was told it would be easier than most because the building’s history is well documented.
It turns out that the school was one of 5,358 elementary schools, teachers’ homes and industrial buildings constructed between 1913 and 1937 in 15 Southern states and partially funded by the Julius Rosenwald Building Fund.
The full text of the Glade Spring School historical marker
Glade Spring School was built here in 1921-22 to serve Black children in grades 1-7. This building replaced a deteriorated 19th-century structure. Support for its construction came in part from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, created in 1917 after Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, head of Tuskegee Institute, had partnered in a school-building campaign. This fund helped construct about 5,000 schools for Black students across the rural South; Glade Spring was the only one of these in Washington Co. Meredith Stuart, born in Glade Spring, attended Tuskegee under Washington’s leadership and taught here. The school closed in 1965 when the county’s schools were desegregated and became a community center.
The fund was established by Rosenwald, then the president of Sears, Roebuck & Co., and Booker T. Washington, the Black activist, educator and founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The effort was hailed as one of the most successful school construction projects in the country over the first half of the 20th century, according to the historic resources department.
“The remaining school buildings reflect not only one of the most ambitious school building projects ever undertaken but also symbolize the struggle of African Americans for educational opportunities in a segregated South,” states the department’s website.
It cost almost $5,000 to build the school, according to Preston. It was Washington’s idea to get communities and towns involved, he said.
According to his research, Rosenwald is believed to have paid $1,000 toward the school. The Black community and the white community each contributed $500, and the county school board paid about $1,200, Preston said.
In Virginia, 382 Rosenwald schools were built. The Glade Spring School was the only one in Washington County.
The school has another link to the Tuskegee Institute. One of its most beloved teachers, Meredith Stuart, who was born in Glade Spring, attended Tuskegee under Washington’s leadership.
Although he didn’t realize it until he was older, Preston now sees that Stuart taught her students a lot about life by sharing stories from her own life — like when she was in college and the first time she rode an elevator.
He was particularly pleased that the text of the marker will include Stuart’s role as teacher. He plans to invite her three children to the dedication ceremony.
One of Preston’s sources for the school’s history was a book called “Come and Go Again, Segregation, Tolerance and Reflection: A Four Generation African-American Educational Struggle.” It was written by Jerry Jones, a Glade Spring native and visiting professor at Emory & Henry College for 20 years who attended the school from 1953 to 1960. In the book, he writes about his life in the town and the school.
Jones’ most vivid memories of the school are of the 15-minute walk in all kinds of weather and the “precise” graduation ceremony the school had when he finished the seventh grade.
He also has fond recollections of his second teacher at the school, William Anderson, who taught him from 1957 through 1960 and also served as principal.
“I excelled significantly under his direction,” said Jones, whose mother and uncle went to the school in 1922, the year it opened.
Preston, too, remembers Anderson, who had a military background and taught his students how to march military-style. At the time, Preston said he wondered how he would ever use the skill, but when he went to college and was in the ROTC, he ended up winning medals for his marching.
Although the children attended the school because of segregation, several of its former students, including Sandra Turner, remember it fondly and say they received a good education from smart and caring teachers.
Like Preston, Turner grew up living within sight of the school, just down the hill. She resides there today after moving back from Maryland, where she lived for more than 40 years.
Several former students did recall, however, that their desks and books were secondhand and came from the county’s white schools.
A sign, at long last
It was May 2023 when Preston started working on the application for the marker, and he turned it in on July 31, the day before the deadline.
A dedication ceremony for the marker is expected to be set later this year.
The applicant for the marker was a group called Remember Us, which is responsible for paying the $3,000 cost of manufacturing it.
The proposed location is at the intersection of Crescent and Azalea drives, which is near the school. The Virginia Department of Transportation has approved the site.
VDOT must also approve the cost estimate for installation, according to Jennifer Loux, manager of the highway marker program. Once that happens, the historic resources department can place the order for the marker from the foundry. It usually takes five or six months for a marker to be delivered after it’s been ordered, she added.
Preston said he was surprised the marker was approved on the first try, and he was prepared to keep trying until it was approved.
The timing of the application may have been fortuitous. Until recent years, the marker program largely ignored Black history, but that is changing. In the last five years, 63% of all new markers in the state have focused on Black history.
Today, the school’s exterior is a dark red brick, which Preston said was added some time after the school closed. Though it’s not original, the school is likely in better shape because of it, he added.
The roof appears to be tin or metal and there are visible holes and other damage to several spots. Because the roof is in such bad shape, Preston said the extent of the damage to the interior isn’t known.
The vacant building, which sits atop a hill, is owned by Cheryl Coleman of Bristol, who said she bought it with her father at auction in 1985. Coleman only attended first grade at the school, and since she was only around 6 years old, she doesn’t have the memories of it that others do.
Still, she shares the hope with Preston, Jones and Turner that the attention the marker is bringing to the school will result in interest in doing something with the building.
Coleman said she’d like to give the school back to the community. Both she and Preston talked about getting help to find grants that would help pay to restore the building so it could be used again in some way. No decision has been made as to what it would become.
Jones, who lives in his family’s 1870 house in downtown Glade Spring, is happy about approval of the historical marker, mainly because he doesn’t remember a time the school ever had any kind of sign.
“I find it very ironic that all of the years that the school was there … there was never any marking that a school was on that hill,” he said. “So, 100 years later, our school finally gets a sign.”
Correction, 10:50 a.m. Feb. 28: The cost to build the Glade Spring School was nearly $5,000. Incorrect information about the cost was provided for an earlier version of this story.