For more than 50 years, African-Americans attended Kent County’s one-room Worton Point Colored School No. 2. Now a museum, its former students share memories of attending a segregated school without indoor plumbing or running water. Despite these shortcomings, many say it was the best education they ever received.

They sit around the long table in the old Worton Point Colored School No. 2, seven African-American men and women in their 60s and 70s, all but one former students of the school, sharing memories of their days here in the 1940s and ’50s. They mention teachers: Miss Taylor, Miss Turner, Miss Gibbs. They remember games of dodgeball and Annie-over, collecting ferns in the woods, a pot of soup set to simmer for lunch on the potbelly stove at the front of the room.

The green-shuttered, whitewashed building, built in 1890, looks much the same on the inside as it did when they were students, they say, except for the wood paneling that covers the walls, the drop ceiling, and the thick gold carpet on the floor. The old red water pump and green enamel sink where students washed out their cups are still in the same corner. The Lord’s Prayer is written across the blackboard in the front of the room, and you can still catch a glimpse of the coal house from the side window.

The large cross studded with small light bulbs hanging above the blackboard is a remnant of when the schoolhouse was used as a church in the 1980s while the current church, St. George Methodist, was being rebuilt nearby, they explain.

“I wasn’t fortunate enough to go to a one-room school,” says Kay Somerville, the one adult in the group who was not a student here. “But I’ve been in this community for 50-some years, and this building is very important to me because we have used it so spiritually.

“Every community needs a church,” she continues, “’cause when you go past it, even if you don’t attend, you know it’s there. The school is the same way.

All those precious memories.”

Under the guiding hand of Somerville’s daughter, the gospel and jazz singer Karen Somerville, the precious memories of the individuals who attended this more-than-a-century-old Kent County school are being preserved. Renamed the African American Schoolhouse Museum, the small building has become a repository for the Eastern Shore’s largest collection of 19th-century photographs of African-American life, according to Karen Somerville. It also contains pictures and memorabilia from the community, whose 70 members are direct descendants of freed slaves from the nearby Gale plantation, now known as Andelot Farm.

Somerville didn’t intend to establish a museum when in 1994 she put out a call for community photographs and artifacts to display at the former schoolhouse. Her effort was part of a fundraiser for the completion of St. George Methodist Church next door. She intended to dismantle the schoolhouse exhibit after the fundraiser, “but there was such a great following, I ended up having to leave the exhibit up,” she explains. “I never thought it would be long term, but once I realized what I really had, then I just decided that’s exactly what we need to do is turn this into a museum.”

Somerville has since added to the schoolhouse’s historical collection, and recently received a grant that will allow her to compile a CD of stories and songs gathered from people who attended school or church here.

Visiting the museum is a view into a community both typical and yet utterly particular of the African-American experience on the Eastern Shore. Inside, church pews and school desks speak to the building’s varied uses over the years. (After the school closed in 1958, the church purchased the building from the Kent County Department of Education and used it variously as a meeting hall, community center, and church.) On side displays, an old wooden ironing board and iron, a soup ladle, and a handsaw sit side by side with school report cards and diplomas. There are photos everywhere—of a female student, dated 1956, in a neat white blouse, her hair pulled back; of the Heavenly Echoes, a gospel group who performed in the five-county region. A hand-lettered sign sitting atop a glass case filled with undocumented photos, reads “Who are they?” and Karen Somerville admits that “occasionally people come in and recognize photos of their families.”

But it’s the stories of the former students who lived and learned in Worton Point that create a true portrait of life in this small community north of Chestertown. Says Somerville, matter-of-factly: “Before Hillary Clinton went to Africa and learned it takes a village, we lived that way.”

One-room schoolhouses were an integral part of the African-American educational experience on the Eastern Shore in the late-19th through the mid-20th century, and although exact numbers are tricky to pin down, records show that in 1927, there were 16 “colored public schools” in Kent County in historically African-American communities like Morgnec and Melitota. Although they eventually became part of the Kent County school system, schools like the one at Worton Point were established by the community, not by the local government. “The establishment did not really see a need to see us educated, but our ancestors did,” says Airlee Johnson, a retired real estate professional who attended Worton Point in the 1950s. “And I’m sure they worked very hard to have the schools in their own community. [It was] a grass-roots movement.”       

The Worton Point school served grades 1-6, after which students attended the all-black Garnett High School in Chestertown.

Karen Somerville’s father, Alton Somerville, was a student at Worton Point in the 1940s. A tall man with an engaging grin, he recalls how hearing the ringing of the morning bell on his way to school was his cue to start running. He’d fly down the wooded path dressed in knickerbockers and long stockings, passing through the old cemetery, past the boys and girls outhouses behind the school, to be in his seat at 9 o’clock in time to join the teacher and 30 or so students in singing “My Country ’tis of Thee” or another devotional song.

If you were late, remembers Joan Freeman, another former student, the teacher would recite a rhyme—“Dollar, dollar, 10 o’clock scholar/You used to come at 9 o’clock, but now you come at noon”—and you wouldn’t be allowed to come to school until noon the next day, a shameful situation you wouldn’t want to have to explain to your parents.

Absences from school were a matter of course; young men were needed to work the fields during harvest, and young women, like Irene Moore, the museum’s chief docent, whose mother kept her home every Monday to help with laundry, had household chores to attend to. But lateness was never tolerated, as an old report card in the museum suggests. Alice Phillips may have missed 51½ days in 1925, but she was never late, and her grades were more than acceptable.

School days, the former students remember, had a comfortable routine. The recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and the “Pledge of Allegiance,” the latter said outside while one of the boys raised the flag to the top of the flagpole if the weather was good, followed devotions. Roll call came next, and then the teacher opened the windows for some fresh air to accompany morning calisthenics before lessons began.

The students in each grade sat together, explains Alton Somerville, and while the teacher worked with the handful of students who made up each grade (there were eight in his class), students in other grades would read their lessons or study. Basic subjects like reading, arithmetic, and spelling were taught by grade, but sciences and social studies were taught to the whole school. This arrangement “worked well,” says Airlee Johnson, “because we could learn from each other.”

Interspersed with lessons were music and art appreciation. Emma Lively, a classmate of Alton Somerville, remembers a song the class learned to help them identify ferns in the woods.

Johnson, who attended the school a decade after Lively, recalls the teachers the county sent in for weekly art lessons. “They were the only white teachers we had,” she says. “We did finger painting and clay, but we used real clay. None of that Play-Doh. And that was fun because we had a chance to play in real dirt.”

Discipline was ingrained from the start. “There was none of that speaking out, you know,” says Alton Somerville. “You had to ask. You had to raise your hand to say something.”

Punishments ranged from being hit with a switch that students would fetch themselves to standing in the corner to a ruler’s smack across the palm of the hand. Irene Moore recalls having to write “I must be quiet in class” over and over on the chalkboard—but only once. “I learned my lesson,” she says. Greater transgressions might result in a letter home to parents or the ultimate shaming, a public dressing down in church on Sunday by your teacher.

“There was an awful lot of order in class,” says Johnson. “Teachers didn’t lose control. Because then your parents would hear about it and that was the worst thing.”

School discipline involved physical work as well. Students were assigned chores, from cleaning the outhouses to bringing in coal from the coal house to keep the potbelly stove burning to patrolling the cloakroom to make sure all the coats and hats were hung up tidily. “We had to sweep the floors every day,” recalls Rudolph Black, a student at the school in the 1950s.

“The only thing we didn’t do was cut the grass.”

Local students often went home for lunch, but during the winter months, explains Lively, each child could bring their own bowl to have a hot lunch that the teacher had simmering on the coal stove at the front of the room. It was beans or soup, often thick with hominy, and its smell filled the classroom. When the coal stove was replaced with gas heat, Rudolph Black remembers, the teacher would go to Irene Moore’s family home next door to cook the soup.

The school day ended at 3 o’clock when students heard the bus rumbling over the hill and lined up orderly for dismissal. “You’d go home, and you couldn’t wait until the next day to go back,” says Alton Somerville. “School was fun to me [then].”

What is most clear in conversations with former students is that in the era of segregation, this closed, intimate community of the classroom was a boon, rather than a burden. “A lot of children now, they don’t like to go to school, but it was like family here,” says Moore. “We sang together, we learned together, we prayed together. And I just loved it.”

School was less engaging, the former students say, when they moved on to Garnett High School. Despite the fact that it was a treat to go to a school with running water and indoor bathrooms, larger classes and less attention from teachers made students treasure their one-room schoolhouse experience even more. “I learned more out here than I learned at other schools,” says Alton Somerville, echoing what other former students express. “When [the teacher] taught you something here, you knew it.”

“When I see other classmates that were here, it’s like [seeing] an old family member,” says Airlee Johnson with a smile. “It’s like our own little private school—with a lot of love.”

Freelance writer Mary K. Zajac wrote about historic Chesapeake cookbooks in our last issue.