Elementary students at the Mars Hill Anderson Rosenwald School. Photo courtesy of the Mars Hill Anderson Rosenwald School
By Lauren Stepp
In a small cove of Madison County, a modest wood-frame building served as a cornerstone of education for generations of Black students. Sarah Roland Weston Hart was one of them.
“Our day began with prayer,” she recalls of her time at the Mars Hill Anderson Rosenwald School (MHARS) in the 1940s. “Then we would close the sliding doors. Grades first through fourth were in one room and fifth through eighth in the other.”
Hart still remembers those school days: walking home for lunch, playing games like dodgeball and preparing for annual events such as the annual May Day celebration.
“The memories of family, community and school are still fresh,” she says. “Our teachers wanted to see everyone have an education.”
The school Hart attended was part of a sweeping philanthropic experiment that reshaped Black education in the Jim Crow South. Between 1912 and 1937, the Julius Rosenwald Fund helped construct more than 5,300 Black schools across 15 states.
The MHARS was built in 1928. Money from the Rosenwald Fund, combined with $750 in matching funds from the community, financed a new building on the site of the former Long Ridge Colored School, which had operated since 1905.
“Black children were always very adamant that they got the cast-off books and the hand-me-down desks,” says Willa Wyatt, who has led preservation efforts since 2009. “But when the Rosenwald school was built in 1928, everything had to be new to receive funding.”
According to Wyatt, the design of Rosenwald schools was deeply intentional. School orientation prioritized east-west exposure to maximize natural light, while windows improved airflow and reduced eye strain.
“The children were to be seated so that the sun came in through the big windows over their left shoulder,” says Wyatt. “That way, when they were writing, there wouldn’t be any shadows.”
While thoughtfully designed, the MHARS had few amenities. Until the 1950s, there was no indoor plumbing, just two privies at the back of the building. Water was carried from a distant spring, and the boys were expected to arrive early to chop wood for the stove.
Still, the education students received there was rigorous. “The older students didn’t just study reading and math,” says Wyatt, who has interviewed many alumni over the years. “They studied Shakespeare, performed plays, held musicals—it was a rich and creative learning environment.”
The school closed in the wake of integration and gradually fell into disrepair. In the 1970s, it served informally as a recreation center for local youth. By the 1980s, it was being used to air-cure burley tobacco. But in 2018, after nearly a decade of grassroots advocacy and restoration work, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
“It is very important for people—especially young people—to learn about the Rosenwald School and how much work was put into it,” Hart says. “They should realize how important getting an education is.”
The Mars Hill Anderson Rosenwald School is located at 225 Mount Olive Drive, Mars Hill. For more information, see AndersonRosenwaldSchool.com.
