I have little information on the Nazarene Baptist Church in Jasper County, South Carolina. The building was constructed in 1960. The earliest listed burial on FindAGrave is in 1901 and belongs to Reverend Calvin Lawton. Lawton had two wives and 23 children. Several of his children are buried in the cemetery, so I suspect Lawton was one of the church’s founders. The church is no longer in use, but the cemetery is active.
This website identifies this as the Sardis School and that it is a Rosenwald School. It is a Sardis School since the Sardis CME Church shares the same land. However, the build date of the 1940s and the style indicate it is not a Rosenwald School.
For several years, the Georgia Department of Education provided reports on the state of Georgia’s schools. These reports are a goldmine for photos of old schools. Although most are not extant, they provide context for what schools were like in the early 1900s.
The Rosenwald School Fund formally began in 1917. However, Julius Rosenwald started donating money to help build schools in the South for Black schoolchildren as early as 1912. From 1912 to 1932, Rosenwald Funds helped fund the building of almost 5,000 schools. In the state of Georgia, 242 schools were built in 103 counties (Jones, 2021).
The 1921 school report that includes the above photo shares (p. 68), “The Jasper County Training School, at Monticello, has been completed. This is a building of the most modern type, with six large class-rooms, two smaller rooms, auditorium, ship-room, and ample cloak room space. The aid of the General Education Board has made it possible to completely equip on room for Home Economics teaching.” The school was built at the cost of $8,000. Black community members provided $4,200. The general education fund provided $2,200, and the Rosenwald Fund provided the rest.
The school is no longer standing.
For additional reading, I recommend this blog post titled, “From Equalization Schools to Desegregation in Monticello, Georgia: A Historical Sketch” and a newspaper article in The Monticello News titled, “A Forgotten Black History of Monticello-JCTS.”
The Allen Cemetery is family cemetery located in Jasper County, Georgia. The gate to the cemetery is locked, but FindAGrave identifies this as the gravesite of John (1815-1891) and Nancy (1816-1882) Allen. John and Nancy are the parents or in-laws of everyone buried in the cemetery.
From the historical marker, “Established on Edisto Island about 1686 by Scotch dissenters, this is the second oldest Baptist organization in the South. For many years a branch of First Baptist Church in Charleston, Euhaw declared itself a separate church in 1745 after relocating to this vicinity from Edisto Island. A sanctuary was built 6 mi. NE in 1751; it burned in 1857. The first sanctuary on this site was built in 1860. It burned in 1904 and was replaced by the sanctuary in 1906, which is still used for occasional services. The present sanctuary nearby was built in 1982.”
The church was built for the wealthy planters who used Grahamville as a summer home. The sanctuary was built to hold over a 1000 people, most of those seats being taken by the enslaved people of the church members.
This is the Warren Academy which used to sit next to Mount Olive Church. Founded in 1875, it was one of the few schools in Jasper County at the time. I have been unable to determine the relationship between the church and school, but I am assuming that the school children attended both the church and school.
