Friends Of
CHERRY GROVE SCHOOLHOUSE
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National Register of Historic Places Property
Washington-Wilkes County, Georgia
OUR MISSION
Our mission is the rehabilitation of the structural, historical and cultural legacy of the Cherry Grove Schoolhouse due to its local importance in the educational evolution of African-American children in Washington-Wilkes County, Georgia.
OUR
VISION
Our vision is the rehabilitation of the schoolhouse so that it may become economically self-sustaining. To utilize its status on the State and National Register of Historic Places as one of the tour sites of Wilkes County, Georgia.
WHAT MAKES THIS SCHOOLHOUSE SPECIAL?
The Cherry Grove Schoolhouse is a rare surviving example of an early 20th century rural African American school building in Georgia. The building was constructed circa 1910 on the grounds of the Cherry Grove Baptist Church (founded 1875) as a part of the 175th school district for the rural farming children of Cohentown and Sandtown. It is a one-room wood-frame schoolhouse of approximately 465 square feet. It has a timber frame wooden structure covered in clapboard supported by stacked stone piers.
It still retains a high level of integrity through its materials and design as a rural African-American church-based schoolhouse; its original location; its setting and feeling in a rural area; and its association with the education of African-Americans in Wilkes County.
Our hope for the schoolhouse is that it may continue to teach students about the evolution of education for African-American children who lived in the rural farming communities of the County. Additionally, the school is to become an educational space for programs and exhibits that foster dialogue around education or rural African Americans in Georgia and in the South from the early 1910s until the changes brought about by the U.S. Supreme Court decision – Brown v. Board of Education in the early 1950s.