Founded in 1926 on the corner of Ivanhoe Plantation, this land was donated by Mrs. Clarissa Dye and her son Rowland Dye to start a one-room schoolhouse. They were the direct descendants of Charles Alden Rowland, the founder of Ivanhoe Plantation.

The school was started when Jim Hall, a sharecropper on Ivanhoe Plantation, asked the Dyes about the possibility of getting land to start the school. When it opened, there were no glass windows, just shutters. It had a white steeple roof. Savella Hall, Jim’s wife, was the first teacher at the school.

Like so many schools, the building had other uses. On the weekend, it served as the benevolent society.

Thank you to the Burke County Archives for confirming the identification of the building and sharing the older photo of the school. Information on the school was pulled from Eugenia Mills Fulcher’s 1999 dissertation, “Dreams do come true: How rural one- and two-room schools influenced the lives of African Americans in Burke County, Georgia, 1930-1955.”