About
About Laurel Grove School: Getting This History Out
In the 1990s, northern Virginia's urban sprawl threatened to destroy three landmarks of an African-American community that had sprung to life at the end of Reconstruction: The Laurel Grove Colored School, Baptist Church, and Cemetery. Key individuals, however, blocked the developer's bulldozer, formed the Laurel Grove School Association, and restored the one room schoolhouse. An interdisciplinary team of community members, curriculum experts, teachers, historians, and museum curators recovered the history of the school from oral histories and local archives, refurbished the classroom, and crafted a fourth grade history curriculum to teach slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and life under Jim Crow. Today the school is a museum along the African-American heritage trail.
So much of the history of slavery, emancipation, and freedom has been obscured by textbook generalizations. But the Laurel Grove School was established and sustained by real people whose lives touch ours. William Jasper, on whose farmland the school and the church were both built, is the grandfather of surviving alumnae of the school. In our curriculum, the lives of such "ordinary" but astonishing people are connected to famous Americans like George Washington, to earth-shattering events like the Civil War, and to the institution of Jim Crow segregation. Through them all of us are privileged to be witnesses to this history and to connect our American dreams—including those of newly arrived families—to those of the Laurel Grove School students and their families.
With generous support of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and as part of the We the People initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities, our current project—Laurel Grove School: Getting This History Out—will allow us to revise an earlier curriculum to make it more usable for a wider group of teachers and students by:
- Selecting and streamlining six lessons that are most important to the curriculum and most relevant to the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOLs).
- Partnering with George Mason University's Center for History and New Media (CHNM) to digitize a set of Laurel Grove School primary and secondary sources by using Omeka.
- Expanding our audience to include elementary, middle and high school history teachers.
- Presenting a five-day teacher institute featuring presentations by two historians to define both the larger and specific historical contexts of the Laurel Grove School. Particularly important will be making connections between local stories and state and national events and issues.
- Having teachers from six Virginia school districts pilot our revised and improved lessons in their classrooms.
The Laurel Grove School Association—a community based, certified 501 (c) (3) private non-profit organization—has developed their original one-room colored schoolhouse as a site to inspire and instruct local students, teachers, and community in the values, methods, and history of the Laurel Grove School experience. The story of the Laurel Grove Colored School epitomizes the actions of many freedmen and freedwomen after the Civil War. Former slaves built the one-room schoolhouse; parents, grandparents, and neighbors provided the materials and labor and scraped together funds to purchase books and furnishings. Through their efforts, this school opened a gateway to the literacy and basic skills necessary for the first generation born to freedom.
This project is funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.