THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 4, 1996 TAG: 9607310047
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K7 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: OBSCURE TOUR
LOCAL LANDMARKS THE TOUR BOOKS NEVER MENTION
SOURCE: BY WENDY GROSSMAN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 46 lines
DOWN PRINCESS ANNE Road past Virginia Beach cornfields and strawberry farms sits the shell of Pleasant Ridge Elementary School.
It's a touch smaller than the toolshed in the opposite corner of Asbury United Methodist Church's lot. Set up on 12 brick pillars, the paint is coming off, the door is locked.
But not for long. A handful of inmates from Sheriff Frank Drew's community task force are sanding and scraping, repairing the windows and renailing everything to make sure it's real tight - and that it looks just as it used to.
``I've been driving by that little school for the past 30 years and it just sat there and deteriorated,'' says Sheriff Frank Drew. ``I hated to see it go by the wayside.''
Of the 43 county schools that were around in 1900, this is one of the few left standing. It's the last one-room schoolhouse in which black children were educated in Princess Anne County, Drew says.
``It's an important part of the history of our county,'' says Barbara Henley, councilwoman for the Pungo borough,who is working with Drew on the renovation project. ``It's being preserved so that we can have folks understand what schools were like in earlier years.''
Back in the 1880s, the building was part of a two-room schoolhouse on Charity Neck Road for white children. At the turn of the century, white citizens built a new school. Soon after, the school for blacks burnt down. To replace it, the ``big room'' of the old white school was hitched to a team of horses and dragged over to Pleasant Ridge. Classes were taught there until 1956.
Then it was forgotten.
In 1990, Henley chaired a committee that tried to raise funds to renovate the school. Her committee built a new foundation, but ran out of money and couldn't finish the project. The sheriff's crew hopes to get it done this month. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
WENDY GROSSMAN/The Virginian-Pilot
The schoolhouse off Princess Anne Road is being renovated by inmates
from Sheriff Frank Drew's community task force. by CNB