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Published Monday, July 26, 2010 in Local

Old school building in Turin will be a community center

By Jeff Bishop

The Newnan Times-Herald

Turin is about to take another leap forward as it preserves an important slice of the past.

"There are a lot of good things going on in Turin, but this may be the most important thing we've done," said Turin Mayor Alan Starr, referring to the renovation of the old school house on Turin Road.

The school was built as part of the The Rosenwald School Building Program, which began in 1912 and has been called the most influential philanthropic force that came to the aid of African-Americans at that time.

Preservation efforts are under way at Rosenwald school buildings across the South and Southwest. These buildings are being saved through a combination of grants, private donations, fundraising, and volunteer work.

The Rosenwald Initiative, begun by Julius Rosenwald, provided seed grants for the construction of more than 5,300 buildings in 15 states, including schools, shops, and teachers' houses which were built by and for African Americans.

Rosenwald gave Booker T. Washington permission to use some of the money he had donated to Tuskegee Institute for the construction of six small schools in rural Alabama, which were constructed and opened in 1913 and 1914. Pleased with the results, Rosenwald then agreed to fund a larger program for schoolhouse construction based at Tuskegee. In 1917 he set up the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a Chicago-based philanthropic foundation, and in 1920 the Rosenwald Fund established an independent office for the school building program in Nashville, Tennessee. By 1928, one in every five rural schools for black students in the South was a Rosenwald school, and these schools housed one third of the region's rural black schoolchildren and teachers.

At the program's conclusion in 1932, it had produced 4,977 new schools, 217 teachers' homes, and 163 shop buildings, constructed at a total cost of $28,408,520 to serve 663,615 students in 883 counties of 15 states.

Today many of these Rosenwald school buildings are gone, victims of changing times and communities. The National Trust for Historic Preservation formed the Rosenwald Schools Initiative to devise a plan for the preservation of Rosenwald schools.

The Rosenwald school in Turin has been completely restored for use as a new town hall and it "looks gorgeous," Starr said.

"The county has done an amazing job," he said. "It is authentic with regard to how the school was originally built."

The new town hall / community center will be "much larger than our current community center," which will be leased to small businesses, Starr said.

"We hope to rent out the new school to bring some revenue in, and we want to place an African-American museum on one side of it to show the heritage of the school," said Starr. "There's nothing else like it around here."

There will be an open house when the restored building opens, he said, "and we're inviting the local churches like China Grove Baptist to participate."

"A lot of people around here went to school at that school and remember it well," he said. "We'd like to get everybody together and maybe take a picture at the school."

Starr said he hopes the town can eventually construct sidewalks to link the restored school to the downtown area.

"It's kind of off the beaten path, but it's a much nicer facility," he said.

Initial funds for the restoration came from a $10,000 grant from a private company when a cell tower was installed, he said.

"And then we spent gobs of money seven years ago," he said. Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax funds have also gone toward the renovation of the school.

Over $150,000 has spent on the restoration to date, he said. Much of the labor was provided free of charge by the county.

"We've done it about the cheapest way we could," he said.

"And we're still not done working on it," said Starr. "We're still working on the parking lot."

Starr said the lease of the current community center and the renting out of the new one should help fill the town coffers for years to come.

"Any source of revenue we can get goes a long way in a small town like Turin," he said.

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