NA Homes: Central School

North Augusta Homes - Central School
By Lisa Kaylor Staff Writer
Posted April 21, 2009 4:20 PM

The original Central School is located on Aiken Avenue, about a block from Our Lady of Peace Catholic School.
Behind the Our Lady of Peace Catholic School Annex on Aiken Avenue sits a piece of North Augusta's history.
In 2004, local historian Wayne O'Bryant opened the doors to what he thought was a gray cinder block storage building.
What he found was an old schoolhouse.
"I had gone in there to get some Christmas decorations and noticed the boards and the stove, and started asking questions," he said.
O'Bryant discovered that the building once housed the first and second grades of the old Central School. He wrote a manuscript about the school and hopes to one day get a plaque to commemorate it.
The Central School opened in 1926 and, along with Second Providence Baptist Church, was the hub of the African-American community of Summerhill, he said.
The original Central School was a wooden building that sat where the Our Lady of Peace Annex building now houses it's middle school.
The annex on Aiken Avenue was built in 1935 to house the first and second grades.
Central School shared the little annex building with the Summerhill Work Club, which was made up of members of Second Providence.
A deacon of the church and member of the club, Alfred Frazier, encased the building in cinder block in the late 1930s.
The original Central School building across the street was torn down to make way for the brick building that is on the site now.
The Rev. Nathaniel Irvin, who pastors Old Storm Branch Baptist Church, remembers starting the school as a first grader in 1935.
He remembers cold mile-or-so walks to school, and when he got there, cold classrooms. He sometimes had to help make a fire to heat them. There was no indoor plumbing, but outhouses. Their books were passed down to them from the white schools.
"A pitiful lunch," he said. "Pinto beans and rice most times."
Irvin attended the school for six years, and said the name of the school was changed to the Summerhill Annex in the 1960s.
Desegregation in the 1950s closed the Central School, and the little annex on Aiken Avenue was given to Second Providence, where many of the Summerhill families attended.
It is now predominantly used for storage.
This is a continuing series that features historic homes and buildings in North Augusta.
Reach Lisa Kaylor at lisa.kaylor @northaugustatoday.com.

http://natoday.augusta.com/node/5363