With only two teachers and classrooms, Capitol Heights’ Ridgeley Rosenwald School pales in comparison to the size of campuses of schools like Landover’s Thomas G. Pullen, which sits just over a mile away.
But the recently restored 84-year-old school that closed in the early 1960s and was once open to only black students will soon serve as a tangible reminder of how far Prince George’s County has come in educating all children.
County agencies and descendants of the Ridgeley family will celebrate the school’s $1.1 million restoration during a ceremony at 3 p.m. Wednesday at the school, at 8507 Central Ave.
The school will serve as a mini-museum and Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission staff is stocking the building with period furniture and artifacts appropriate to the time the school was open as a permanent exhibit, said Gail Thomas, the black history program manager for Park and Planning.
“We'll have original lighting globes from the school, two or three pages of a child's math homework, chalk, crayons, marbles and [building] blocks,” Thomas said. “We'll have the original school bell that was used.”
Julius Rosenwald, the former Sears, Roebuck and Company president, made the 1927 school construction possible. He awarded communities grants they matched to build schools in rural black communities.
The school cost about $5,000 to build, a combination of funds from Rosenwald, the school community and the Prince George’s County Board of Education, Thomas said.
Mary Eliza Ridgley sold part of her family’s land for the school to be built in 1927. The family’s last name has appeared with and without the first “e” in land records, according to Park and Planning.
Mary’s daughter, Mildred Ridgley-Gray, 90, attended the school from grades one through seven — the only grades offered — before attending another Rosenwald school, Landover’s Highland Park.
Mattie R. Green, Gray’s older sister, was one of her teachers. The school was open until the early 1960s when it closed as a special education center and became the site of a county public school bus depot.
Gray, who now lives in Mitchellville’s Collington Episcopal Life Care Community, said the teachers were “firm but fair,” and all students brought their own lunch but got soup lunches on Fridays.
“Those were happy days because we knew nothing else,” Gray said. “At least you were getting out of the home of your immediate family and that's where you had friends and the like.”
Since 2004, multiple groups expressed interest in some type of preservation such as county’s alumnae chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc. and the Prince George’s Historical and Cultural Trust, Thomas said.
Booker T. Washington created the original plans for the two-teacher school, said Monica Wharton-Henley, a Park and Planning architect. Wharton-Henley said they almost lost the building due to the snowstorms of 2010, but the contractor, Laytonsville-based Oak Grove Restoration, built a wooden frame to keep the building standing.
“That’s probably the strangest thing that’s happened to keep this building from becoming a pile of debris,” Wharton-Henley said.
Work included stabilizing the school’s foundation and preserving original roof shingles. Linoleum preserved the original hardwood flooring Thomas said.
The windows are one of the more striking features of a Rosenwald school, Thomas said. There are about five at Ridgeley that let in a large amount of natural light, she said.
“You get a feeling of light and airy and you can just imagine the children sitting there using all that natural light to acquire all this learning,” Thomas said.
nmcgill@gazette.net
Copyright © 2012 Post-Newsweek Media, Inc./Gazette.Net