Rosenwald Schools are one-room schools built many years ago when Arican-American children had no school to attend. Julius Rosenwald gave Booker T. Washington permission to use some of the money he donated to Tuskegee Institute for the construction of six small school is rural Alabama. These were built in 1913 and 1914. Pleased with the results, Rosenwald agreed to fund a larger program for schoolhouse construction. In 1917 he set up the Julius Rosenwald fund. By 1928 one in every five rural schools for black students in the South was a Rosenwald school. These schools housed one-third of the region's rural black students and teachers.
One of these precious schools and a vital part of our nation's history is located in Sadieville, Kentucky. We are trying diligently to refurbish this school to use it for a history learning center, display of the African-American history that is rich in Sadieville and connects with Nicodemus, Kansas.
In October of 2011 we had enough funds to replace the roof on our Rosenwald School. During this process the chimney simply disintegrated and fell off the roof onto the ground.
After finishing the roof replacement, I collected the potentially usable bricks and placed them in two boxes inside the school. It just seemed there would be a way to utilize them in the future.
For this year's September in Sadieville, to be held September 8th, I determined to clean some of those bricks, paint and stencil them, and then sell them as a fundraiser to help with the restoration. They could be used as door stops or simple decorations.
Claude brought the boxes to our home and placed them on the patio. Then, bless his kind heart, he chipped all the old mortar off the bricks and stacked them as he used to stack hay as a youth on our back porch.
This week I sat down Monday night and made an outline of the brick size with pencil and paper. I cut that out so I knew what surface area I had with which to work. Then I set to work to find a simple picture of a school building. I looked at pictures I have taken of our Rosenwald school and clip art pictures found on the Internet. I then created a drawing of simple one-room building that I felt comes close to our Rosenwald School. I purchased a stencil of letters at Hobby Lobby. Putting my school drawing and the letter stencil together I came up with a stencil pattern for the bricks. I traced this onto stencil paper and then cut out my stencil with an Exacto knife.
Tuesday night I went out to the porch with an old ice cream bucket, Palmolive dish liquid, and scrub brushes in my rubber glove covered hands. As fortune would have it, that happened to be a cooler evening and it was quite pleasant to sit and scrub 24 of the best of these bricks with soap and water to get the soot off them.
Last night I brought the 24 bricks into my family room and placed them on our card table which I had covered with old paper. Then I painted the best large flat side with a coat of black acrylic paint.
This morning I stenciled with white acrylic paint the words "Rosenwald School - Sadieville, KY" and a little picture of the schoolhouse.
I'm very happy with the results and hope they provide much needed income to help with our continued refurbishing of our American history treasure.
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