Remembering Rectortown No. 12, a Historic Rosenwald School

By Leonard Shapiro

Photos by Leonard Shapiro

Betsy Kleeblatt, a great grand child of Julius Rosenwald, and Karen White Hughes, president of the Afro-Ameeican Historical Association of Fauquier County.

Frederic Michael Grant chats with Marshiell Fox Clark and Lorraine Tucker Stewart, all are former students at Rectortown No. 12.

Dick and Jane were required reading

When Betsy Kleeblatt moved to a farm

in the tiny village of Rectortown in 1981, she had no idea how close she was living to a historic schoolhouse her storied great-grandfather had helped fund 57 years earlier. Three years before she moved back to Washington in 2001, she learned all about the Rosenwald School—“Rectortown No. 12”—less than a mile away from her front door.

In 1912, Julius Rosenwald, a Jewish philanthropist from Chicago and president of Sears Roebuck & Company, was asked by Booker T. Washington, then head of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, to join the all-black college’s board. Their friendship flourished, and they forged a remarkable partnership that led to the creation of the Rosenwald Fund to support the education of African-American students in the segregated South.

Between 1917 and 1932, the foundation helped build 382 Rosenwald schools in Virginia, eight in Fauquier County, including No. 12 located behind what is now Claude Thompson Elementary School. In November, a rousing and often moving program was held at Claude Thompson to dedicate a historic plaque commemorating the Rosenwald school.

Betsy Kleeblatt was there, along with a number of No. 12 graduates and teachers, including former Middleburg Town Councilwoman Eura H. Lewis, who taught there. The three-classroom school for first through seventh graders was built in 1924 at a cost of $4,500 and closed in 1963 when what was then known as Northwestern Elementary opened.

Several speakers recalled the good times, and a few bad. Frederick Michael Grant, a former student, remembered walking to school and having white children throw Coke bottles at him and his friends from passing busses. They found alternate routes through the woods, though he once fell into a snowdrift and had to be pulled out by his siblings.

Back then, Grant said people would tell him, “Nothing good would ever come out of Rectortown.” He and many others obviously proved them wrong. Grant earned a double master’s degree, followed by a Ph.D. and proudly spoke about many more of his highly successful classmates.

“Something good has come out of Rectortown,” he said. “We bonded together and made that school the best that we could.”

Historical Marker Sponsors

• Afro-American Historical Association

• Claude Thompson Elementary School

• Friends of Rectortown, Inc.

• The Jewish-American Society for Historic Preservation

• Mount Olive Baptist Church, Rectortown

• Rectortown United Methodist Church