Pleasant Grove School
National Register Listing
Street Address:
1012 Joe and Marie Road, Alcolu, SC (Clarendon County)
Alternate Name:
Pleasant Grove Community Center Inc.
NRHP Nomination
Record Number:
S10817714011
Description and Narrative:
Pleasant Grove School is a one-story, rectangular-plan, wood-frame building built in 1933. The front-gable roof features exposed rafter tails and the building is clad in weatherboard. Pleasant Grove School has replacement wood six-over-six sash windows on its side elevations. The interior features a centrally placed brick chimney for the stove that provided heating for the classrooms, and the interior walls and ceiling are clad in beadboard, covered by plywood paneling. The area around the school is rural and minimally developed. Pleasant Grove School is locally significant as one of the oldest surviving purpose-built schools for Black students in Clarendon County and the only surviving pre-World War II school in the rural Alcolu community. The Black community in Alcolu purchased land and built the school through volunteer fundraising efforts. Pleasant Grove was a segregated school serving Black children during the Jim Crow era and operated under the white-run Clarendon County School District. Functioning as a community hub, Pleasant Grove School had a basketball court and baseball field behind the building (not extant), a community club, an active Parent Teacher Association, an in-house kitchen for the hot lunch program, and 4-H activities for the local children. The construction of Pleasant Grove School represented a major grassroots effort to provide for the education of local Black children despite a lack of meaningful investment from the local and state governments. The building is also a physical manifestation of the inequality in school facilities that would help spark the fight against segregation in Clarendon County. The limitations of the small, volunteer-funded, vernacular school building demonstrates the inequality between white and Black schools of the period. After World War II, the continued disparity between Black and white educational experiences led the Black community in Clarendon County to pursue integrated school facilities through legal action in Briggs v. Elliott, the first of five cases eventually consolidated under Brown v. Board of Education. The school closed in 1953, at which time 159 students were enrolled in elementary school there. Pleasant Grove School and other small, rural schools were replaced under South Carolina’s school equalization program, a state effort aimed at preserving segregated public education by “equalizing” Black and white school plants. Listed in the National Register September 18, 2023.
Period of Significance:
1933 – 1953
Level of Significance:
Local
Area of Significance:
Ethnic Heritage: Black;Education
National Register Determination:
listed
Date of Certification:
September 18 2023
