CHESAPEAKE, Virginia (AP) – On a piece of hard land just steps from an aging one-room schoolhouse, a white tombstone spells the name of the man who never left.
Randolph C. Snead Sr.
December 8, 1939
March 22, 2021
Decades before his death, Snead was studying math and other subjects at the 20 by 30 foot Cornland School. His aunt Ethel, buried in the family grave a few rows away from him, also attended. The sturdy building still stands on his family’s property.
For years, the school in front of Rosenwald, built for the education of African-Americans, stood empty, but an impetus from Snead’s wife, local historians, parishioners, a councilor, state delegates and congressmen breathed new life into the building.
This summer, the school will be uprooted from its historic location along Benefit Road, loaded onto a truck and towed about five miles to the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp. It will be a museum and the centerpiece of a $ 9 million historic center that will showcase exhibits about the subway and maroon communities, as well as an outdoor classroom.
The city council last week unanimously voted for a $ 3 million grant from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources to help build a visitor center, parking and exhibits. The city allocated $ 400,000 to relocate the school last year.
There’s no set schedule for when the village will be built, but the goal is to have portions of it open by spring 2023, said Mike Barber, director of Chesapeake Parks, Recreation and Tourism. The city is hoping for another $ 3 million grant from Congressman Donald McEachin, who announced a few weeks ago that the historic village was part of his application for funding for the coming fiscal year.
Efforts to preserve Cornland go back a dozen years. Randy Snead was frustrated at this time and wondered why it was taking so long. At some point he said he would like to tear it off completely. He was the type of person who liked getting things done. Snead’s wife convinced him otherwise.
“I told him we needed a reference to tell our kids how far we’ve come,” said Wanza Snead. She wanted to follow the mission of the nonprofit Cornland School Foundation: educate future generations about the early efforts to educate African American people.
In 2010, Preservation Virginia, a Richmond-based nonprofit, listed Cornland as one of the most endangered historic sites. The group said the school was the oldest African American school in Hampton Roads, built before the Rosenwald School Movement when philanthropist Julius Rosenwald was born in the early 20th century.
The Cornland School Foundation helped get the school listed on the National Registry of Historic Places and the Virginia Landmark Registry. Since its inception in 2011, the group, led by Councilor Ella Ward, has found around two dozen former Cornland students still living in Chesapeake. Researchers believe the school was built in 1903.
The oral records of the former students are striking testimony to an era of separate schools established after the Virginia Constitution of 1869 that required public education for all children but required white and black students, according to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources be taught separately. White students generally had access to more schools and teachers and a longer school year. Black schools received far fewer resources.
Years ago, passers-by on Benefit Road didn’t know the Cornland School was there – grapevines covered the facade and the grass grew tall. Volunteers helped remove asbestos from the interior walls, replace some exterior planks, and put sand under the building to absorb moisture.
One recent Monday, Ward, a former educator and chairman of the Cornland School Foundation, organized a group – including two former students – to tour the school and the proposed new location.
When it was a schoolhouse, Cornland had no running water or electricity. A wood stove in the middle of the room kept the students warm and was used to cook lunch. The students in grades 1 to 7 were taught by a teacher in daylight. Once the school has moved to its new home, the building will face the same north-south orientation. The city will also be reinstalling its original wooden floors, the boards of which are now piled high in one corner.
The school was built using natural materials from sawmills in the Great Dismal Swamp, said Patti McCambridge, a member of the foundation.
The exact date that Cornland was built is a matter of dispute. The building served as the reincarnation of a school believed to have been built by ex-slaves in 1885, according to Virginian Pilot’s archives. Others say there was at one point a Cornland School for white children, and the school for African American children took on several names: Cornland School for Colored Children, Cornland School No. 4, Benefit School.
What is clear is that Cornland is one of the few remaining post-Civil War schoolhouses built for African Americans in Norfolk County, now part of Chesapeake, according to a 2010 Department of Historic Resources report.
When the school closed in 1952, Cornland students were relocated to the newly built but racially segregated Southeastern Elementary School.
Emma Mitchell Nixon and Mildred Brown attended Cornland School and visited the building last week. They remember running 7 or 8 miles to and from school. White students on school buses sometimes threw stones at Cornland students or hurled racial slurs, the students remember. Brown said Cornland got a bus there for the last of their seven years – but it was so worn and used it broke every week.
Despite these challenges, they were determined to learn. In addition to learning math, writing and other core subjects, the teacher also showed the students how to knit, sew and work with wood.
“That was the only school I had to go to,” said Nixon.
Randy Snead attended school until about 1950, then moved to other separate schools. He later earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Virginia Union University in Richmond and held an engineering position until he retired in 1998.
About seven years ago, Snead told a Virginian Pilot reporter that he never thought the school had any historical significance.
“I didn’t think anyone would be that interested,” he said.
But the Foundation believes his experience and that of many other Cornland students need to be shared.
The school – and the educational center it will belong to – will tell a story that hasn’t been told in the history books, Ward said.
Ward grew up in separate schools in Suffolk. In a recent interview, she recalled her time at math conferences where she found that other schools in Virginia offered trigonometry while hers didn’t. She decided to protest with other students at her school and urged the headmaster and headmaster to offer the class.
Ward shares this story to remind people of the struggles that have been waged for a more equitable education system. It is important to understand this story, she said.
And she said it was an opportunity to celebrate what people like Randy Snead have achieved in spite of everything that stood in their way.