History of Shiloh-Rosenwald Community
According to Mary S. Hoffschwelle, the Rosenwald School was designed to provide education to children. Unlike other people know, these schools have served as the model of white schools and standards of different schools use these schools as a reference.
Even though the schools are known as Rosenwald Schools, the fund of Rosenwald is not the only fund that was used to build the school. The funding came from different partnerships and grants. 1/3 of the funds came from the Rosenwald, 1/3 from the local community as well as 1/3 from local funds, which include taxes. The community of the school also raised funds to match grants from Rosenwald Fund. To support other maintenance expenses of the school, the leaders of the community build campaigns. Churches also donated a land and some committees purchased a land for the formation of some school.
A former slave even donated to $38 to the community of school as he hoped to see his children to have future in education. With the different methods used by the community to raise funds, huge amounts of money were raised to improve the schools and these became the community’s center of education and history. Some Rosenwald Schools continued to operate until 1960s in different locations. But, most of these schools are now just structures with a strong foundation.
Shiloh School, unlike other schools, is a 2-teacher type, which was designed by the architects of Tuskegee Institute. The students of Tuskegee made the bricks of the school by hand. Rosenwald Foundation provides $300 as an initial donation. This donation of the said foundation is not a handout, but it represents the 1/3 of the money required. The local community also contributed funds to construct the school. Each family provided monetary contributions and labor from selling vegetables, fruits, and other products. Because the school does not have prodigious fund, it has no electricity and has a pot belly stove. There is also a well in the school for the source of drinking water.
Rosenwald schools were developed by Tuskegee’s architecture professors. All the implementations and plans for the school were under their management. But, as the year passed by, the design of the school’s structure was modified. The plans for the school’s designs include aspects of clean lined, simple buildings with classic desk design and arrangement of windows which makes it so vibrant and eye catchy during the earliest times. Even though the fund is not many, Rosenwald Schools have reached the plans of the architects.
A Jesup Wagon designed by George Washington Carver, Helped Educate the Community
In 1896, Booker T. Washington, the first principal, and president of the Tuskegee Institute invited Carver to head its Agriculture Department. Carver taught there for 47 years, developing the department into a strong research center and working with two additional college presidents during his tenure. He taught methods of crop rotation, introduced several alternative cash crops for farmers that would also improve the soil of areas heavily cultivated in cotton, initiated research into crop products (chemurgy), and taught generations of black students farming techniques for self-sufficiency.
Carver designed a mobile classroom to take education out to farmers. He called it a “Jesup wagon” after the New York financier and philanthropist Morris Ketchum Jesup, who provided funding to support the program.