Henrico’s Chatsworth School, a one-room schoolhouse during segregation, celebrated as a National Landmark

Lloyd Gregory Smith has many memories of Chatsworth School – the desk near the window where he would sit and watch planes fly overhead. The smells of pork chops and bologna sandwiches that would fill the one-room schoolhouse during lunchtime.

But Smith also remembers a time when Chatsworth was in shambles. After the all-Black schoolhouse was shut down in 1956, amidst efforts of school integration, the school was left to deteriorate, with junk piled up around the exterior and the inside wholly abandoned.

Now, almost 70 years later, Smith and his former classmates have returned to the one-room schoolhouse to find it restored to its original state, serving as a museum open to the community and an official National Historic Landmark.

The restoration work, headed by members of the Antioch Baptist Church, was celebrated at a gathering on June 7 by a number of former students along with other community and church members. Church leaders, as well as Henrico School Board member Alicia Atkins, unveiled a new plaque at the front of the school.

For Rev. James Sailes, who was the pastor at Antioch Church for many years, refurbishing Chatsworth School was a dream he has had since the 1980s. But it was a long time coming, with Antioch Church purchasing the schoolhouse in 2000 and the preservation work first starting in 2019.

“There's a piece of history here that is so valuable that we cannot afford to just let it go untenable,” Sailes said. “I didn’t think it was supposed to go into oblivion. We knew that it was worth something much more. We did not want to see it die.”

The schoolhouse, which was founded in 1908, was one of 23 schools supervised by Henrico educator Virginia Randolph. One teacher taught about 25 to 30 students from first grade through fourth grade, and in the school’s early years, teachers would have to drive horse-drawn wagons to school each day if they did not live with a local family.

The school had no running water or electricity, but despite the lack of amenities, it became an “anchor” for the surrounding community, said Stephenne Belle, a member of Antioch Church who helped refurbish the school.

“No plumbing nor electricity, but they screened the kids for kindergarten. They screened for tuberculosis. They did health clinics in here for inoculations,” she said. “They did many things in this building for the community…even though they didn’t have those amenities.”

When he was a first-grader at the school in 1954, Smith remembers the Chatsworth as one big family, with older kids walking the younger kids to school and siblings helping each other with their schoolwork in class. Some of his fondest memories were around lunchtime, when the students would all open their different lunch bags and the smells of home-cooked food brought Smith “to heaven.” Or when they could all go outside and eat their food together under the shade of their favorite big tree.

Other conditions of the school were not as pleasant, such as the outhouse students would have to use for the bathroom, which was just a small building with a hole in the ground. And the outdoor trough they had to pump water into in order to wash their hands. But for Smith, being surrounded by his siblings and classmates was enough of a blessing.

“You just kept going, you kept rolling, because you were with your friends and your buddies, and you’re having a good time,” he said.

Yvette Smith Robinson, who attended Chatsworth from 1950 until 1954, remembers a similar tight-knit atmosphere in the schoolhouse, with classmates bringing clothes to share with more underprivileged students and students from all grades working together in class.

“Really, I enjoyed coming here. It was a beautiful thing, because we were all one community and we all worked together,” she said. “The older grades had to help the younger grades with reading and math and different things. I would go pick up kids and bring them across the road so they could get to school on time, and stuff like that.”

With the schoolhouse now open to the public, Sailes hopes that nearby schools will take advantage of the museum and bring young students to visit the property. Some descendants of the schoolhouse’s former students still live and even go to school in the area, he said, but many are unaware of Chatsworth and its historical significance.

Sailes also believes that some younger folks have become disconnected with everything the schoolhouse stood for – independence, community, determination, and a deep desire to become educated. Revitalizing the schoolhouse was not just for its former students, he said, but for all of their descendants and the community’s younger generations.

“I am afraid that much of our young people are disconnected from the struggling of African-Americans,” Sailes said. “People are now free to choose to go to school where they want, choose their own ideology and their own study, and I think that’s a mark of achievement. But where did it come from? How did you arrive at this particular point? The history of where we come from should never be lost.”

One of the main goals of the six-year-long restoration process was to preserve the integrity of the schoolhouse, Belle said. She and Sailes even consulted former students who attended other Black one-room schoolhouses in the area to ensure the accuracy of the museum.

Over the years, many other Black schoolhouses have been left abandoned or have been torn down completely, Belle said. But a century after its founding, Chatsworth still stands “on solid ground,” and its lasting structure not only preserves history, but “reawakens” a future built off of what Chatsworth stood for: the fight for education.

“Chatsworth has a lot of moving parts. And it's here. It's a representation of what occurred during that period of time,” Belle said. “Many [schoolhouses] have been torn down. Others have been repurposed to something else. But Chatsworth is still here.”

Liana Hardy is the Citizen’s Report for America Corps member and education reporter. Her position is dependent upon reader support; make a tax-deductible contribution to the Citizen through RFA here.