Scrabble School

Scrabble School soon after construction in 1921. (Scrabble School Preservation Foundation)

African Americans in the Woodville area, led by Isaiah Wallace, wanted a better school for their children. They raised money and learned about the Rosenwald Foundation. Sears magnate Julius Rosenwald, at the behest of Booker T. Washington, established a fund to help build schools for black children in the South. It required matching funds from black and white citizens. In Rappahannock County, white residents contributed, but African Americans donated ten times more, plus they donated the land and built the school themselves in 1921. The structure was light and airy, a good example of Rosenwald school design, with a central sliding partition that divided the interior space in half.

African American community members supported the school throughout its history, raising money, contributing time, even making homemade soup for students and the two teachers every Friday—“Soup Day.” Students in grades one through seven sat in rows according to their grade. Some also hauled wood or coal, and water before indoor plumbing was added in the 1960s. The building served until 1967 when Rappahannock County integrated its public schools. In 2005, the community rallied again around the school, this time to preserve it and advocate its use as a senior citizens’ center and heritage center.

Resources

• Scrabble School Foundation. www.scrabbleschool.org/

People in the Places

Isaiah Wallace (1876-19--) 

Education was hard-won for Isaiah Wallace. One of eleven children born to parents who had known slavery, Isaiah grew up on Red Oak Mountain where the family lived off the land. For a year and a half at the age of nine he attended school in a 14 x 20-foot log building. There eighty-eight pupils, including four adults, sat on slab benches. He then worked full-time for various employers who helped or allowed him to continue his education on the side. Around the age of fifteen, he ran away to Pittsburgh, staying first with relatives, then worked at various jobs in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Rhode Island. He returned to Virginia, married Malinda Payton from Culpeper, and took up the stone masonry and plastering trades. After soldiers returned from World War I he decided to organize a league to work for a better school. With money from black and white citizens and a grant from the Rosenwald Foundation, they built Scrabble School in 1921. By then a widower, Wallace married Lila Dangerfield, a college-educated teacher who helped him continue his own education. She taught in a crude and overcrowded schoolhouse at Eldorado in Culpeper County, so he organized a similar initiative for another Rosenwald School there. He tried organizing other leagues but, he regretted, “the people would not work together." Wallace expressed deep satisfaction that, through the model schools at Scrabble and Eldorado, he helped children of color gain access to the quality education they needed and deserved.

Resources

• Nancy J. Martin-Perdue & Charles L. Perdue Jr., eds. “Isaiah Wallace,” in Talk about Trouble: A New Deal Portrait of Virginians in the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.