Long-forgotten African-American schoolhouse in Williamson County saved

Emily R. West | The Tennessean

Show Caption Hide Caption 10 places The Heritage Foundation helped in preservation The Heritage Foundation of Franklin and Williamson County has had a hand in saving several places in the area. Here are the Top 10.

Georgia Harris traced her finger along the many faces in her class photo from first grade.

Her finger went down a seated row until she landed on herself.

"You see right there?" she asked. "That's me."

Harris attended the Lee Buckner School on Duplex Road as a child in the 1940s and 1950s. The one-room schoolhouse gave dozens of African-American students a place to learn before desegregation.

"I thought my teacher was the smartest person in the world," she said. "She taught me cursive, and she would play us music because she played the piano. They taught the Bible, and we had to say a Bible verse every morning and have a devotion. School was much different then than it is now."

Decades later, Harris' school sits in tatters. Glass is shattered across the floor. Paneling has disappeared, and pieces of wood have deteriorated. Harris said she couldn't sit idle while her school continued to fall apart.

"It's my history," she said. "It's my first school that I ever went to. It's like home."

A conversation in passing

Harris didn't realize her school had fallen off the map, nor that preservation leaders didn't know it still existed.

The school was one of 375 Rosenwald schools built in Tennessee. The schools were designed by former slave and Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald, CEO of Sears, Roebuck and Company. Together, they designed 3,000 schools nationwide starting in 1917. The schools' purpose was to serve as a place for African-American children in rural communities to learn.

Three of those schools were in Williamson County, according to a Rosenwald school database maintained by Fisk University.

When talking with Williamson County Historian Rick Warwick, Harris brought up where she went to school as a girl.

"We were talking about something completely different one day, but I mentioned where I went to first grade and later other grades," she said. "That's when he asked me if it was still standing, to which I told him that I thought it still was. He took it from there."

Link to the past

As soon as Warwick discovered the school still existed, he started his research.

He discovered the schoolhouse location originally had another structure, a log building that served as a Freedmen's Bureau during the Civil War. It also was used as a Methodist church, Warwick said.

Later, the building transitioned to a school.

"Those schools were in Nolensville, Franklin and Brentwood," Warwick said. "But the log building was replaced with the Lee Buckner School that is there today. Around 1965, they consolidated all of the black schools in that part of the county and sent them to a school in Thompson's Station."

By 1968, schools were integrated in Williamson County. Students from the Lee Buckner School cluster eventually went to Hillsboro in the Burwood community.

Schoolhouse savior

When Warwick brought the Lee Buckner School to the attention of the Heritage Foundation, preservationists wanted to figure out a way to save it.

CEO Bari Watson Beasley said the preservation nonprofit had been wanting to save a schoolhouse for the last year.

"Boiling Springs in Brentwood is a great model of how a schoolhouse can be saved," Beasley said. "That got us to the thought of the importance of saving schools. From our research, we identified up to five in the county. But of all of those, the Lee Buckner School was the most endangered. We want to honor the story there and African-American history."

Only about 10 to 12 percent of Rosenwald buildings remain standing, and many are in disrepair. In 2002, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Rosenwald schools to its list of America’s 11 most endangered historic places. The Lee Buckner School is also the last left in both Williamson and Davidson counties, Beasley said.

The Heritage Foundation purchased the Lee Buckner School from Hattie Baines, a longtime educator and community leader in Franklin.

Plan for the future

The cost of preserving the schoolhouse is uncertain, Beasley said.

But the Heritage Foundation will eventually move it from its Duplex Road location to a more accessible area. The purchase of the school was made possible by a pledge from the foundation's Next Gen membership base.

"Through this process, we’ve talked to Mrs. Baines about how we want to use this as a learning lab for children," Beasley said. "My vision for this now that we have secured the building is cleaning it up and finding the location we are moving it. That is where it will be preserved and restored."

Beasley said it also would become an extension of the Heritage Classroom. The organization wants to reach every student in Williamson County Schools and the Franklin Special School District, a total of more than 40,000. In the last five years, it's reached 15,000.

Harris said she's glad to see the schoolhouse return to its roots.

"I tell my grand- and great-grandchildren that knowledge is power," Harris said. "If you want power, get knowledge."

Reach Emily West at erwest@tennessean.com or 615-613-1380 and on Twitter at @emwest22.