In an ongoing process to revitalize the former White Rock Elementary School into a community hub, Lynchburg city officials are announcing next steps at a public meeting Saturday.
The meeting will be held at 11 a.m. in White Rock Baptist Church, after being rescheduled due to last week’s winter weather.
The school was built in 1912 to educate the neighborhood’s white students. About halfway through its history, as integration changed Lynchburg’s education system, the building stopped serving as a city school and became home to Lynchburg Community Action Group’s Head Start program. When Head Start moved out a few years ago, the building that was an education hub for more than 100 years was left vacant.
“This school was originally built more than a century ago, and if it gets renovated, it’ll be here for another century or more. That’s a pretty long connection with the community, a long history of community resources…and there’s such value in saving those resources, learning from those resources,” said Marcus Pollard, the principal and senior historian of the Commonwealth Preservation Group, which has partnered with Lynchburg on the White Rock project.
The project to reimagine the school as a multi-use community center for the White Rock neighborhood started in fall 2024 and resulted in a final concept presentation in May. Full design documents and construction plans will be completed by 2027, according to the city’s project webpage.
In the meantime, the city plans to nominate the school for listings in the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places. Recognizing the school’s past in that way will unlock tax credits that the city needs to keep the project moving forward.
On Saturday, residents can learn about the project from officials representing the city and the Norfolk-based Commonwealth Preservation Group. The meeting will focus on what lies ahead in the revitalization project, specifically how the historic nomination process works, according to a city press release.
The vision for White Rock Community Hub
Last year, the city partnered with Work Program Architects to gather input from residents to make a plan for how to reuse the vacant White Rock school campus. The project area includes two structures — the former school and cafeteria buildings — and the lot that surrounds them, tucked between Buena Vista Street, Poplar Street and Tulip Street.
WPA representatives conducted door-to-door outreach and community meetings in fall 2024, including a “pitch day” where residents were invited to present their ideas for the space. They combined findings from those interactions into a final concept presentation in May.
The presentation outlined plans for a multi-use hub that would address numerous community needs. The ground floor would house city-run resources, including a branch of the Lynchburg Public Library, offices for Parks and Recreation and a police substation. The second floor would offer flexible meeting and co-working spaces for residents, with some areas reserved for local nonprofit tenants.
In the concept plan, the former cafeteria would retain its use and become a gathering place for meetings, meals and food education. Outside, picnic areas, a playground and other recreational spaces would be created.
The goal for the reimagined space would be to offer programs for all ages and abilities, the presentation states, from storytimes and early literacy programs for children to after-school tutoring and workforce readiness programs for teenagers to recreational tournaments and educational programs for adults.
The nuanced history at the building’s foundation
Today, city officials are working with the Commonwealth Preservation Group to get White Rock Elementary School recognized on state and national registers of historic places. That means that as the city plans for White Rock Elementary School’s future, the school’s past is remembered, too.
That history is nuanced in a building that “stands as a reminder of segregation,” as some residents described in WPA’s October 2024 report.
White Rock Elementary School was built in 1912 by Stanhope S. Johnson, one of Lynchburg’s most well-known architects who also designed local landmarks like Virginia Baptist Hospital and the Allied Arts Building, said Lynchburg Museum Director Ted Delaney. The school was built to serve white children, Delaney said, after the city annexed the White Rock Hill neighborhood in 1908 and needed to expand its school system as a result.
In the following decades, White Rock Elementary School was a community center for white families, home to everything from PTA meetings to spring festivals to Christmas-wreath decorating competitions, as documented in local newspaper archives.
As Lynchburg’s population grew and the need to “relieve overcrowding in present elementary schools” grew with it, city leaders initiated a process in 1957 to build a school within a half-mile of White Rock Elementary, according to archives of The Daily Advance newspaper. The new school, named Carl B. Hutcherson Elementary School, served Black students.
When Lynchburg started a process of integration in the late 1960s, it was left with two elementary schools in the same neighborhood. In 1971, the school system returned the White Rock Elementary School building to the city, according to archives of The Daily Advance newspaper. It was one of five “out-dated elementary schools” to close as the city’s education system changed “in order to meet requirements by the federal courts on integration,” as described in an April 1971 Daily Advance article on the history of Lynchburg’s public schools.
Lynchburg Community Action Group took over the former White Rock school and ran its Head Start program there for about 50 years. The organization moved out a few years ago because the building is not ADA accessible, which made it difficult to meet requirements for federal grants, according to a WPA report.
During that half-century span, the White Rock school took on a new story of supporting local low-income families by promoting school readiness and cognitive and social development in young children. It became a community touchpoint: “All adults around either went to Head Start at White Rock” or have a family member who did, as some residents described in a WPA report.
Carl B. Hutcherson Elementary School remained a part of the city’s public school system, and is now known as Hutcherson Academy and offers educational services for young children with disabilities and pre-kindergarten programs.
When history pays off
Getting buildings like the former White Rock school onto historic registers is, in part, a symbolic move in order to officially recognize the cultural and architectural history that is significant to a community, Pollard said.
It’s also a chance for the city to earn financial support for the preservation work it’s undertaking. Once a building is listed on state and national historic registers, it becomes eligible for rehabilitation tax credits. State credits provide 25%, and federal credits can provide an additional 20%, in dollar-for-dollar reductions on eligible rehabilitation expenses.
Virginia’s rehabilitation tax credit program is more generous than many other states’, Pollard said, and has “driven a lot of preservation that wouldn’t have happened otherwise” because it allows developers to take on the challenge of renovating old buildings without as much financial risk.
The Lynchburg City Council allocated $3.5 million in the fiscal year 2024 budget to renovate the former White Rock school. “As current funding will likely not be sufficient to complete the full renovation,” city officials are hoping to stretch the budget by securing tax credits, according to the city’s project webpage.
Project leaders have completed the first step of the recognition process, Pollard said, by turning in a preliminary information form to the state’s Department of Historic Resources. Once they receive feedback, they can begin the official nomination process with state and national agencies. The entire process should be completed by the end of 2026, Pollard said.
In the meantime, he said, residents can help move the process along by keeping memories of, and hopes for, the White Rock building alive.
“If there are alumni who have stories or information about the school in its early days, that’s always a real plus when you get to the larger nominations,” Pollard said. “If not, bring your curiosity and questions about the process. That’s just as important.”