One-Room Schoolhouse

One-Room Schoolhouse. Buckingham, Virginia. , Union Grove School is representative of the many one-room school for African American students that could be found in the first half of the 20th century in Buckingham County and the surrounding area. The African American members of the community built Union Grove around 1925, and like most schools, i was named after a local church. An African American farmer and storeowner donated the land, and the parents of students cut and milled the lumber., At first, both students and teachers walked to the school. The teachers were usually women of the community who had some education beyond the standard elementary level allowed African Americans. But as time passed, students rode to Union Grove on segregated buses, and as more African Americans graduated college, teacher standards were raised to include these more highly educated men and women., Yearly enrollment varied between 20 and 35 students in each of grades 1-7. Students were taught the basic subjects of reading, writing, arithmetic, history and geography. Older students often helped younger students while the teacher was busy with another grade level. There was no electricity , only windows or a kerosene lamp for light and one or two woodstoves for warmth for which the bigger boys had to cut the wood. There was an outhouse but no well, and children had to carry buckets of water from the nearby farm., Union Grove School was closed in 1964 when the last 12 one-room African American schools in Buckingham County were consolidated into new, but still segregated, multiroom classroom brick schools. The new elementary schools, Stephen J. Ellis and Washington Carver, remained segregated until complete desegregation of the county school system in the fall of 1970.