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Patty Wentworth

CLAIM TO FAME: Over the past 40 years, she’s won 300-plus ribbons at the South Carolina State Fair for her baking and crafts.

DAY JOB: She works in the South Carolina Office of the Inspector General handling complaints via the hotline. The agency investigates fraud, waste, abuse, mismanagement and misconduct in the executive branch of state government.

HOMETOWN: Columbia.

ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS: “Butter makes everything better,” says Wentworth, who swears by cooking with fresh ingredients. A good stand mixer also pays off. She’s had her KitchenAid mixer for 30 years.

Best in show

Ask Patty Wentworth how she came to win so many first-place ribbons at the South Carolina State Fair, and she’ll tell you the story of her parents, Robert and Margaret Moon Wright.

A self-described visual learner, Wentworth often thinks of them when she’s in her kitchen or at her crafts table. She grew up watching her father craft his own fishing lures. She took mental notes as she watched her mother design and make the latest fashions for her and her sisters, and cook, well, just about everything.

“My mother made the very best candied yams. And she never used a recipe that I saw. She was just a wonderful cook who could make good food out of whatever,” Wentworth says. “I was fortunate to have family around me to learn from and also learn that you can do a lot of things yourself.”

For the past 40 years, Wentworth has been entering and winning food and craft competitions at the South Carolina State Fair. And as far as anyone can tell, nobody can top her haul of more than 300 red and blue ribbons. At the 2022 fair, she added seven more to the total.

In addition to cooking and baking, she likes working with miniatures, creating entire Christmas villages out of handmade items. She’s used clay to make Halloween figures, adding moss and sticks from her backyard. She’s painted gourds and rocks and won numerous ribbons for Christmas ornaments and door decorations.

“When you get lost in what you’re doing, it’s a wonderful thing,” Wentworth says.

Having set the example, she’s thrilled to see her three children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren also competing in State Fair competitions.

“A little bit of my creativity has been passed down,” she says. “It’s a great thing when your children have inherited your love of art.”

WHEN 101-YEAR-OLD CLARA DIXON BRITT walks through the restored rooms of the St. George Rosenwald School, the memories come flooding back.

Britt attended the school from fourth grade until her high school graduation in 1939, often walking five miles from her family’s home in the Texas community to arrive in time for morning chapel services. “We came through that door and into the auditorium,” she recalls. “We had worship, and then we’d go to class.”

Restoration of South Carolina’s largest Rosenwald School enters the final phase

BY JARED BAILEY AND KEITH PHILLIPS

She smiles at the memories of excelling in French, playing basketball in the school’s courtyard, and the neighbor lady who sold (and often gave) lunches to students. In her mind’s eye, she can still see on what are now vacant lots at the corner of Ann and Gavin streets the movie theater, barbershop, and other stores of “Uptown St. George,” a segregationera African American community that considered the school a major point of civic pride.

Today, with a little help from South Carolina electric cooperatives, a community coalition is finishing the restoration of the nearly 100-year-old schoolhouse, offering new generations a glimpse into its storied past.

Seed money

Rosenwald Schools are named for Chicago businessman Julius Rosenwald, who was the president of Sears, Roebuck and Co. in the 1920s and 1930s. Rosenwald was inspired to fund the construction of rural schools after Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute, took him on a trip to Alabama. There, Rosenwald observed the dire state of African American education and decided to make a change.

With over $4 million of his personal fortune and blueprints drawn by Washington and his architecture students, Rosenwald set out to reshape American education. But instead of paying for each school outright, he offered seed funding (up to $1,500 per school) with the hope that communities would “buy in” and collaborate to raise the rest.

His strategy worked. More than 5,000 Rosenwald Schools were built throughout the Southeast, and it is estimated that over one-third of all African American students in the first half of the 20th century attended a Rosenwald School.

The St. George Rosenwald School was one of the largest and most expensive of its kind. With six classrooms plus an auditorium, it cost a whopping $8,300. Rosenwald contributed $1,500 to the project, the local black community raised $2,000 through bake sales, fish fries, and king and queen contests, and the county public school system supplied the rest.

Construction began in 1925, and the building was complete in time for the 1925–1926 school year. The school operated for nearly 30 years before shutting down in 1954. In the years that followed, it was used as a community events space and conference center, and it housed a local Head Start program. Eventually, the building, like most Rosenwald Schools, was abandoned and fell into disrepair.

Restoration begins

“I was in the second grade when the school closed,” recalls Ralph James, the chairman of the St. George Rosenwald School Board, the nonprofit organization overseeing the restoration. Aside from his two-year stint in the Army and the time he spent earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Claflin University and S.C. State University, respectively, he has lived in the community his entire life. Since retiring, he has focused his efforts on bringing the school back to life, and his fellow alumni have worked alongside him in this effort.

“We’ve been working with the alumni for probably 20 years,” says James. They’ve had regular project meetings, which James admits sometimes turn nostalgic.

“When we get together, instead of taking care of business, we talk about the good old days and how things were,” he says. “But it’s exciting to see their faces light up and for them to have an opportunity to share.” uu

Delivering desks

The restored classrooms of the St. George Rosenwald School are being filled with vintage school desks, thanks to the efforts of Micah Thompson, a director of Loss Control and Training for The Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina (ECSC).

Thompson is a history buff and antique collector. At the request of ECSC CEO Mike Couick, he began scouting area antique shops for vintage desks to donate to the St. George Rosenwald School. “A couple days later, on lunch break, I was in an antique store looking for my own stuff and saw an old desk,” says Thompson. He texted a picture to Couick, who told him to buy it.

“No pun intended, the rest was history,” says Thompson. Couick asked Thompson to find 20 more desks. So far, he’s found 30. “I didn’t have a place to put them. I was running out of space in my house.”

Recently, Cliff Shealy, vice chairman of the Mid-Carolina Board of Trustees, gave Thompson several pieces of vintage wood from old desks. This wood and the metal parts of desks recovered from the St. George school have become puzzle pieces for Thompson, who is restoring and reassembling them piece by piece, bringing the desks back to their original condition “just like they were the day they got abandoned.”

In 2015, the town of St. George, Mayor Anne Johnston, state Sen. John Matthews Jr., state Rep. Patsy Knight and the St. George High School Alumni Association kick-started the restoration effort. A seven-member St. George Rosenwald School Board was assigned to oversee the project, with James as chairman and Doug Reeves, the chairman of Edisto Electric Cooperative, as vice chairman.

Work began in 2017. Since the school had been exposed to the elements for so long, crews first built a massive barn over the entire building. Workers then gutted out the rot and decay, salvaging as much original wood as possible.

“They dismantled this thing down to the ground,” says Reeves, “and brought it back up using the original stuff that was worth using.”

When the building was occupied by the Head Start program, each classroom’s beadboard walls were painted a different color. These boards were taken down and put in a big pile. Assuming the old colors would be painted over, the crew rebuilt the walls of the auditorium using boards of varying colors. The effect of the unplanned color combinations gave the auditorium a “very, very unique look” that everyone came to appreciate, Reeves says.

“I have yet to show anybody this room that didn’t say, ‘Don’t you dare paint over it. Leave it like it is.’”

Final steps

Six years later, the restoration effort is nearly complete. “We’re getting close; it’s within sight,” says Reeves.

In the south wing, two classrooms have been restored to look just as they did nearly 70 years ago, filled with vintage desks and a chalkboard. Linwood Ling, a local businessman who was in sixth grade when the school closed, says he was moved to see that the classroom looked exactly as he remembered it. “It’s a great experience just to see it come back to life,” he says.

Get There

The third classroom on the south wing has been converted into a meeting room, available to the public.

The north wing has two main rooms (the third classroom was converted into restrooms): the exhibit room and the event room. James says the exhibit room will feature school artifacts contributed by community members. The event room will be a multipurpose room used to host various history programs and special events. Both rooms will be run in partnership with the Children’s Museum of the Lowcountry.

In the heart of the facility, the multicolored auditorium now features an elevated stage, a modern sound system, and plenty of seating for community events. Attached to the auditorium are three smaller rooms: a library filled with books originally used in the Rosenwald School, a warming room where food can be prepared, and the former principal’s office.

As for the outside, the coalition plans to install a dining car (a nod to a former teacher, Ezekiel L. Gadson, who was a porter on the railroad) that will offer a range of Southern fare representative of what students at the school would’ve eaten.

In front of the building, across the street, the school will erect signage to mark the old businesses of Uptown St. George. Additionally, James says the school will partner with the 1890 Research and Extension Program of S.C. State University to plant a community flower and vegetable garden.

Thanks to community coalitions like the one in St. George, the significance of Rosenwald Schools is being recognized across the state and nation. In 2021, the St. George Rosenwald School became part of the African American Civil Rights Network, and earlier this year, the South Carolina legislature with James, Reeves, and several St. George alumni in attendance voted to establish Feb. 28 as Rosenwald School Day.

For more on the St. George Rosenwald School project, visit stgeorgescrosenwaldschool.com or call (843) 860-3141.

James says he is proud of the efforts of the St. George community and that this historic landmark will once again be recognized. “It’s the jewel of the community,” he says.