Cooperative Living May 2021 - 15

" Until then, it was 'hoof it.' If you
didn't have any transportation,
high school was off limits to you.
You just couldn't go. "
-Nathan Bailey, volunteer
amount equivalent to 142,000 digital
photos - and they're nowhere near
completion since the COVID-19
pandemic has slowed activity during
the last year.
" We think this is important
information to have available to the
public as part of the historical record, "
says Julie Goforth, who manages the
project's website and preservation
efforts. " To see something firsthand
in somebody's handwriting makes
an impact, even if you know what
happened. It makes it more personal. "
SCHOOL CHANGES
The abandoned school that housed
answered a scattershot email call
for volunteers at Round Hill.
" There was a room full of boxes,
yards of stuff, and we were completely
overwhelmed, " Arciero recalls. " I went
and grabbed the oldest-looking thing,
because it seemed fascinating, a
leatherbound book, and you could
tell it was ancient. It had beautiful
handwriting entries from the 1870s.
I said, 'Wow, that's old.
Cool.' But we still had
no real sense of what
we had. "
In time, Roeder
recruited nearly three
dozen volunteers
to comb through
a collection of
documents, letters,
photographs and land
deeds for dozens of
schools, many of which
no longer exist.
They have scanned
500 gigabytes of
documents so far, an
co-opliving.com
the old papers was once the heartbeat
of Black education in Loudoun. Known
as the Loudoun Training Center,
students through 7th grade took classes
there on the first floor. With few
exceptions, that was their educational
glass ceiling. Data show an annual
average of 220 whites in Loudoun took
post-elementary classes from 1886 to
1904. For African Americans in the
same period, the average was two.
" It wasn't separate but equal. It was
separate but unequal, " says Gertrude
Evans, a former Loudoun student who
works on student and teacher records
for the project. In digging through
century-old class files, she found the
names of her parents and relatives, and
a lot of information she never knew.
" It wasn't talked about, " she says.
" My generation and the ones after me
didn't know about all this. They had
no clue. "
Nathan Bailey, retired as a manager
from Raytheon, pieces together the
history of school transportation from
records and interviews. He's found
that the school system provided
transportation for white students in
horse-drawn carriages as early as 1911.
Not until 1937 does the first record
of a Black bus driver appear on the
rolls, he adds.
" Until then, it was 'hoof it,' " Bailey
says. Even after Douglass High School
opened in 1941, it was the only Black
high school in a county of 522 square
miles. " If you didn't have any
transportation, high school was offlimits
to you. You just couldn't go. "
In ensuing decades, the Training
Center was used for elementary
schooling and then fell into disuse,
storing records, rodents and mold.
Looking for more clues, Edwin
Washington Project volunteers
explored the unheated schoolhouse
with flashlights, and discovered cracks
in walls. They pried apart planks and
came across a stash of ceiling tiles
that teachers had pressed into service
as makeshift class calendars.
" They were handwritten schedules
of who was teaching what course, "
Arciero says. " We all grabbed them up
(continued on page 14)
Volunteers comb through boxes
of school records collected by
the Edwin Washington Project.
May 2021 | Cooperative Living | 13
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Cooperative Living May 2021

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