Mount Moriah School

Mount Moriah School

Education; Lee County, AL; Mount Moriah School; Rosenwald Schools; Rosenwald, Julius; African American Schools; Auburn, AL; Chewacla State Park; Lee County Board of Education; Mount Moriah Missionary Baptist Church

Located on Wrights Mill Road in close proximity to the entrance of Chewacla State Park, the Mount Moriah Rosenwald School was founded in or around 1932. The one-room school functioned for around thirty years, until the Lee County Board of Education scheduled the closing of the ramshackle building. In 1961, the school’s twenty-six students attended classes in a facility with a leaking roof, shattered windows, rotten floorboards, and no sanitation. A corrugated iron outhouse awaited young ladies in need of a freshen-up; boys were expected to utilize Mother Nature’s facilities. A lack of indoor plumbing forced teachers and students to fetch clean drinking water from almost a mile away. Sears C.E.O. Julius Rosenwald donated $275 to help establish the school, but the local African-American community raised $403 and the county government subsidized $100 of the construction. After the razing of the school, African-American Baptists in Auburn founded the Mount Moriah Missionary Baptist Church on the site of the old Rosenwald School.

Taylor McGaughy

Text Sources: “Mount Moriah School,” Fisk University Rosenwald Fund Card Database, http://rosenwald.fisk.edu/?module=search.details&set_v=aWQ9MzIw&school_county=Lee&school_state=AL&button=Search&o=0

Ralph Draughon, Jr., Delos Hughes, and Ann Pearson, Lost Auburn: A Village Remembered in Period Photographs (Montgomery: NewSouth Books, 2012), 58-59.

Alabama Cultural Resource Survey

2014-11-26

Taylor McGaughy

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English

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