Siloam School: Legacy of perseverance and history

PHOTO | GRANT BALDWIN

A truck carrying the Siloam School – minus its roof – pulls up to the Charlotte Museum of History before dawn on Sept. 7. The 99-year-old building will be restored and turned into an education space.

Saving and preserving Siloam School was a race against time.

And the elements. Not to mention the potential of vandalism.

When the 99-year-old, one-room schoolhouse was unloaded at the Charlotte Museum of History campus last week, Fannie Flono, chair of the Save Siloam School project, could finally exhale.  

“I didn’t shed any tears, but there was a lot of smiling,” she said. “We had some of our committee members who showed up, we were all there at 5 a.m. for this building to arrive and we kind of saw the sun come up with that building. It sounds corny, but the sun was coming up and it was like, ‘boy, this is a new day.’”

Preservation advocates like Flono had reason to celebrate. Siloam School is one of a few remaining Rosenwald-type education spaces for Black students in the rural South of the early 20th century. Seven remain in Mecklenburg County, and Siloam is the only one that will be repurposed as a historic space when it is ready for public use next year. To have survived years of disrepair for a transition to restoration is a win for preservation in a city with a reputation for erasing history.

“This school itself is a community effort, and it is a community effort that’s built on the legacy of the community effort that created the school in the first place,” said Lauren Wallace, the Museum of History’s development director. “As a historian looking at the things that people have accomplished and have done in the past, history is really a collection of people doing extraordinary things, some of them good, some of them bad, and this school is an example of the best of who we can be.

“It's about a community coming together to create the school in the first place. It’s a community, some of whom who had children in the community, some who did not, but who are willing to invest in the promise of education and the doors that it could open. It’s about the donated lumber. It’s about the donated work. It’s about the teachers that traveled 5 miles to get to that school.”

Even when the Save Siloam School initiative reached its goal of $1.2 million, there was no guarantees the old building would be physically capable of making the trip from the University area to the Charlotte Museum of History.

“I did have some anxiety over that, because every day that building was out there, there was no real protection,” Flono said. “Anybody could’ve come and tossed matches and burn the thing down if they wanted to. And it was kind of left to the elements of course, but that was less of a problem because that building had been standing for so long. There was always a danger something could happen to it, and early on we were really not sure at all that we were going to be able to save the building.”  

Siloam School, named after a Presbyterian church located 1.5 miles north of the former site, replaced a log structure originally called Scrub Hill School. The school’s history dates to 1903 when the Mecklenburg County school board bought an acre of land in the Mallard Creek area from F.E. Query for $10.

Siloam was built according to standards established by Rosenwald Schools, an early-20th century initiative to provide education space for Black children in the South.  

Some schools – like Siloam – were established by communities while others received funding from a foundation launched by Sears Roebuck President Julius Rosenwald and Tuskegee University President Booker T. Washington. George E. Davis, the first Black professor at Johnson C. Smith University, was North Carolina’s Rosenwald agent, where he oversaw construction of 813 schools, including 26 in Mecklenburg County.
Siloam School was paid for and built by Black residents but was a public school, research showed. Mecklenburg’s school board paid teachers’ salaries.  

Early funding to preserve and restore the building, which was designated a historic landmark by Charlotte City Council in 2006, forged public-private partnerships. Historic Landmarks Commission, Silver Star Community Inc., Tribute Companies, which owned the property where Siloam School previously stood, made in-kind donations. The city of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County made grants. the Gambrell Foundation chipped in $500,000 and education advocate Sandra Cox Conway donated $75,000 gift.

“It’s been a very interesting journey for me, but I am just so happy that this has been realized,” Flono said. “It is a dream realized for a lot of people. Not just [historian] Dan Morrill, but the Silver Star community, the African American group that has been restoring some Rosenwald schools for a while now. They were at the start of this whole process also. … There’s a lot of happiness going on.”

Safely relocated, Siloam will be restored as a center for history education that include exhibits about the Black experience in the 20th century and the region’s history of racism and injustice. The building will be the only Rosenwald-designed structure in Mecklenburg County devoted to history programming. Wallace is excited for Siloam’s future as a community resource.

“It’s about giving students, giving teachers, giving visitors, giving anyone in the city of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County the opportunity to walk into that space … and see what a community was able to build,” she said. “And for me as a historian, being able to tell those incredible stories is really why we’re here as a museum. I cannot be more thrilled about the fact that the school is coming here.”

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