The restored Siloam School is ready for its public debut

CHARLOTTE MUSEUM OF HISTORY

After an eight-year fundraising and restoration campaign, the restored Siloam School will open as an education space 100 years after it opened to educate Black children in Charlotte’s Mallard Creek neighborhood.

The former Siloam School is ready for its fourth act.

Originally a school for Black children in Jim Crow Charlotte, the one-room building will make its debut as an education space June 15 at the Charlotte Museum of History. An eight-year fundraising and restoration campaign took the historic building from near-collapse to teaching asset. The restored Siloam School will open to the public on at 11 a.m. with a ribbon cutting ceremony at the museum, located at 3500 Shamrock Drive. Public tours will start at 12 p.m.

The event is free and open to the public, and donations will be accepted.

“This is the day that literally hundreds of people who have helped make this project happen have been waiting for,” museum president Terri White said. “Part of why I’m so frazzled …is the week of a big event, all the last-minute snags and details have to be taken care of. But what it represents is, to me at least and I think to a lot of people with this project, is …a commitment to not just saving and sharing history in general, but specifically saving and sharing Black history in Charlotte and that this is a city that recognizes that its history is important.”

The restored building – one of five such structures on the Museum of History’s 8-acre campus in east Charlotte – will become a center for history education and programming. After its original use in 1924 as a school in the Mallard Creek community, the building was converted into housing and later an auto garage, White said.

Siloam School is one of Mecklenburg County's oldest surviving Black schoolhouses and one of the few remaining Rosenwald-era schools in the region. The original building used a Rosenwald floor plan, with the cost of construction covered by the Black community.

Museum historians developed the interpretation program of Black life in early 20th-century Charlotte as the Black community gave its children education opportunities during a time of rigid legal and social segregation that resulted in dual societies.

Siloam School, which sits near the 1774 Hezekiah Alexander Rock House – the oldest surviving home in Charlotte and whose owner, a signer of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence and an enslaver of African people – is part of the museum’s charge to bring history to life.

“I think, one, it further de-centers and de-glamorizes Hezekiah Alexander,” White said. “We don’t take away from the important things that he did for the state of North Carolina, but he also was a person who enslaved people of African descent and we know at least 17 of them. This was a 600-acre plantation, so on this little itty bitty 8 acres that are left to have Siloam School there is, one, just a testimony to how much change has happened in America and in Charlotte, from 1774 to 1924.

“We hope that with our programs and exhibits, we can add color to that massive gap and then also speak about what has changed since 1924 – why did we have to have these one-room schoolhouses versus the integrated schools that we have today? And it’s a great way for us to remind people that everything that we’re experiencing and living with and take for granted today has its roots, not just in the immediate past years, but the long history of how our city became to be.”

The Save Siloam School Project, launched by the museum and the nonprofit Silver Star Community Inc. in 2016, was a community effort to save the schoolhouse, which is on the National Register of Historic Places despite its disrepair.

The project surpassed its $1 million fundraising goal in 2022 with donations from corporate, government and private sources, and the school was moved from its location near UNC Charlotte to the museum campus last September.

“The Save Siloam School Project has been a labor of love and dedication, made possible by a broad coalition of individuals together with corporate and community leaders,” Save Siloam School Project Chair Fannie Flono said in a statement. “The Siloam School now stands poised to become a premier destination for history programming in Mecklenburg County, with a special focus on preserving and sharing the stories of 20th-century African American history in our area.”

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