Friends of Cherry Grove Schoolhouse Inc

The Cherry Grove Schoolhouse is a rare surviving example of an early 20th century rural African American school building in Georgia. The building was constructed circa 1910 on the grounds of the Cherry Grove Baptist Church (founded 1875) as a part of the 175th school district for the rural farming children of Cohentown and Sandtown. It is a one-room wood-frame schoolhouse of approximately 465 square feet. It has a timber frame wooden structure covered in clapboard supported by stacked stone piers.

It still retains a high level of integrity through: its materials and design as a rural African-American church-based schoolhouse; its original location; its setting and feeling in a rural area; and its association with the education of African-Americans in Wilkes County.

Our hope for the school house is that it may continue to teach students about the evolution of education for African-American children who lived in the rural farming communities of the County.  Additionally, the school is to become an educational space for programs and exhibits that foster dialogue around education or rural African Americans in Georgia and in the South from the early 1910s until the changes brought about by the U.S. Supreme Court decision – Brown v. Board of Education in the early 1950s.