For almost 40 years, the bell sounded at 8 o’clock sharp each weekday morning in the fall, winter, and spring. It rang out over sprawling, flat fields of corn and cotton, potatoes and peanuts, cantaloupes and watermelons — all bounded to the west by the North River and to the east by Currituck Sound. You could hear it from Corinth Missionary Baptist Church next door, from Claude and Lottie Gallop’s little country store up the road, and from the fruit and vegetable stands that dotted the sandy two-lane Caratoke Highway, the ones that attracted vacationers traveling from the Virginia border down to the Outer Banks.

For Patricia Ann Jarvis White, the ring of the bell at Jarvisburg Colored School marked the beginning of an education that would take her from rural Currituck County to the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina in Greensboro, and, finally, to upstate New York, where she spent 41 years as an educator herself. “So many memories,” she says with a sigh. “Lots and lots of memories.”

The schoolhouse’s transformation into a museum included preserving old features of the building, like the stove where children once warmed their lunches, as well as collecting and displaying stories of former students and teachers from around Currituck County. photograph by Chris Hannant

When she was 5 years old, White, now 82, was among the last group of students to attend the little white clapboard schoolhouse. She remembers getting up every morning and walking the two miles from her father’s 33-acre farm in nearby Powells Point. She remembers Sunday mornings spent inside the adjacent church, where she played piano for the junior choir. She remembers playing with her friends beneath the tall pine trees in the yard that connected the two buildings near the cemetery out back. “There was straw everywhere,” she recalls, “and we would build little homes out of it, and we’d have our little living room, our dining room, our kitchen. And we’d use little pinecones for our cooking pots.”

But in 1950, the bell fell silent. Jarvisburg Colored School — founded in Powells Point three years after the end of the Civil War, relocated to Jarvisburg in the 1890s as a one-room schoolhouse, and expanded to a two-story structure in 1911 — closed its classroom doors forever.

For almost 40 years, the bell called students to begin the school day at 8 o’clock sharp. photograph by Chris Hannant

On a recent morning, Vivian Simpson leads a small group across the front lawn of the school, now restored to its former glory and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. An old farm bell sits on a concrete slab in front of the building, which today serves as a museum of Black educational history in Currituck County.

Simpson is president of the Historic Jarvisburg Colored School’s board of directors. By the time she was born in 1952, the school had been transformed into a community center where kids would sometimes go to watch movies and eat popcorn. For generations of Black families in Currituck County, the building has been a landmark of fellowship, faith, and self-reliance.

• • •

The Jarvisburg Colored School was a rarity in North Carolina in 1868, when Black farm owner William B. Hunt founded it on a parcel of his land. His stated mission: “the regard for and love I bear for the rising generation of the colored race … for the use of a school in said district for the benefit of the children of the colored race.” This was half a century before famed African American educator Booker T. Washington would partner with Sears, Roebuck and Company president Julius Rosenwald to build schools for Black children in rural communities across the South.

The Jarvisburg school remained in Powells Point for years before it was eventually moved to its current location. In the 1920s, it was joined by three Rosenwald schools — one 12 miles north in Coinjock, another 32 miles north in Moyock, and a third farther inland in Gregory. In 1931, a new high school for Black students, Currituck County Training School, was built in nearby Snowden.

The schools served Black children during the segregation years, when education for African American students looked very different from that of their white counterparts. During most of this period, Black students in Currituck County walked several miles just to get to school while the white students rode buses. What’s more, teachers in the Black schools had to use hand-me-down books that the white schools had discarded for newer, more up-to-date materials.

Before Jarvisburg Colored School closed its classrooms permanently in 1950, a bell would ring out across the fields of mainland Currituck County to summon students to their desks. photograph by Chris Hannant

During harvest season, the Black schools closed for two weeks so that the children could help their parents — some farm owners, others sharecroppers — work the local fields. “We had to do that in order to live,” Ruth Dillard said in a film documenting the restoration of the Jarvisburg school. “But the white kids, now, they didn’t have to take two weeks out of school to pick cotton like we did.” When school let out at 3 o’clock each afternoon, the students would walk home to help their parents with farm duties or tend to roadside stands selling produce to locals and travelers headed to the beach.

Despite the hardships, there was something special about Jarvisburg, something that made it stand out from other schools in the area. It was built differently; it had character. Its history was palpable, and people across the county took pride in it. So much so that some parents who’d left North Carolina for work sent their children to live with their grandparents for the express purpose of attending the school.

• • •

Jarvisburg was more than a couple of classrooms. It was a hub for the Black community. Throughout its time as a school and well into the 1980s — decades after closing its classrooms to students — the building served as an assembly room for the Sandy Ridge Masonic Lodge. In the evenings, long after the students had packed up for the day and walked home, the Masons would gather in the room upstairs for their meetings.

During school hours, though, the building buzzed with sounds of children — singing, playing, chatting, or quietly studying their lessons. The kids would arrive just before 8 a.m. Whoever got there first was responsible for starting a fire in the potbelly stove that warmed the building and heated bagged lunches brought from home.

In the downstairs classroom, rows of desks were divided into three classes: first, second, and third grades. The upstairs accommodated fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. On the lower level, the teacher’s desk and a small chalkboard faced the students. Off to the side was a small kitchen area where meals were prepared for children who were unable to bring lunches from home.

Teachers at Jarvisburg Colored School often taught several grades together in one classroom. The old desks and slate boards on display in the museum today survived for years inside the building. photograph by Chris Hannant

When White started school, she wasn’t old enough to enroll as a first grader, so her experience was more that of a kindergartener. But because her desk was mingled in with the older kids, she learned to read right alongside them. Every morning, her teacher, Miss Naomi Fulford, would hand out assignments, and the students would complete their lessons on their own. After lunch came playtime, during which they’d perform as part of what Miss Fulford called The Rhythm Band. That was White’s favorite activity. “I played the cymbals,” she says with a chuckle, “and sometimes a little triangle instrument.” The day ended when the bell rang again at 3 p.m.

When Jarvisburg closed the following year, White and her fellow students — along with those who attended the other Black schools in the area — were consolidated into Currituck Union School. In 1966, Currituck County schools began desegregation, and the era of all-Black schools came to an end.

• • •

By the 1990s, the old Jarvisburg school building had fallen into disrepair. “It had just gotten so bad that they couldn’t use it anymore,” says William “Bill” Jarvis III, who serves as vice president of the Historic Jarvisburg Colored School’s board. He’s also the younger brother of White; like his sister, he moved away from Currituck County in his young adulthood, spending years in the military before returning to get involved in the school’s restoration.

The project started in 1998, not long after the building was vacated. A trio of former students — Dillard, Norma Williams, and Alice Hunt Lindsey, the great-granddaughter of founder William Hunt — were concerned that the old school would crumble and take with it all their childhood memories. They began a fundraising effort to restore the building. Members of the community and of the church next door rallied around them.

Board members (from left) Leon Saunders Jr., Dorothy Johnson, Vivian Simpson, Angeronia M. Saunders, and William Jarvis III help preserve Currituck County’s past through the Historic Jarvisburg Colored School Association. photograph by Chris Hannant

Soon, the county and state got involved, too, helping with funding and other resources. Lindsey hired a researcher to go through school board records dating back to 1885. Artifacts — books, desks, old photos — were collected for display. Stories from former students were recorded for a multimedia exhibit.

Piece by piece, construction workers took the building apart and reassembled it, using what they could of the original materials and searching the region for woods, like cypress, to replace sections that had rotted beyond repair. The building received national historic status in 2009. Five years later, Jarvisburg Colored School reopened its doors to the public as a museum. When a dedication was held on September 27, 2014, everybody in the community, it seemed, came out to celebrate.

• • •

Under a deep blue sky, Corinth Baptist Church sits quiet today, save for a light breeze rustling the trees. The occasional car swishes by on Caratoke Highway. Four members of the Historic Jarvisburg Colored School’s board of directors — Vivian Simpson, Bill Jarvis, Dot Johnson, and Angeronia Saunders — gather in front of the school.

They’re here to welcome a former student, 89-year-old Tammer Mae Armstrong. Miss Tammer stands proud and regal, dressed in her Sunday best. The group circles around her, leading her up the brick walkway and into the old school for her very first visit since its renovation.

Miss Tammer’s eyes light up when she steps inside. She looks down at the hardwood floor and then up at the photos of people she recognizes. She glances over at the tiny desks arranged neatly in front of a chalkboard. She spots the potbelly stove that she once used to heat the bagged lunches that she brought from her grandmother’s home. She peeks into the nook where the kitchen was. Everything looks almost exactly as it did 83 years earlier, when Miss Tammer was a 6-year-old named Tammer Mae Davis.

When Tammer Mae Armstrong was a girl, she’d walk to classes at Jarvisburg Colored School from her grandmother’s home, located in a wooded area just behind the old schoolhouse. photograph by Chris Hannant

She furrows her brow, deep in thought. “I know this has been remodeled and all, but I still have not forgotten the school here, the way it was,” she says. She nods toward the chalkboard. “The teacher, Miss Naomi Fulford, she had her desk right up there in the front.”

Simpson smiles at Miss Tammer and points to a photo. “Well, here she is,” she says, “right here.”

Miss Tammer beams. “Oh my — sure is!” she says. “She was my first-grade teacher! Miss Fulford was a sweet teacher, I’ll tell you that. I loved to read, and I loved to write. And I loved Miss Naomi Fulford!” She pauses, trails off, then continues: “And you know what? That’s one thing that has stayed right up in my brain until today.”

Memories of a time long ago. A time and place fraught with unimaginable hardship and soothed by a close-knit community determined to overcome. All of it documented in a white clapboard schoolhouse that was the center of life for students like little Tammer Mae Davis, whose adult heart, on this day, is filled with joy.

Historic Jarvisburg Colored School
7300 Caratoke Highway
Jarvisburg, NC 27947
(252) 491-2409
hjcschool.org