The Vanishing Schools of Franklin County, Virginia

This poster will describe "The Vanishing Schools of Virginia," an open-access, not-for-profit educational website that identifies, maps, and contextualizes every single public school in the history of Virginia. The poster will uses tables and line graphs to summarize the origin and evolution of public education in the commonwealth of Virginia. Throughout the nineteenth century, every community in Virginia pursued the idealistic dream of “a schoolhouse on every hill.” When the Department of Education was first established in 1870, there were already more than 2,800 public schools in the state. By 1900, there were more than 7,000 public schools in Virginia. Thereafter, state leaders sought to close as many one-room schools as possible, and to consolidate their displaced students into modern buildings with updated amenities like electricity and indoor bathrooms. As a result, the number of public schools in Virginia has consistently fallen for more than a hundred years, and there are now fewer than 2,000 public schools scattered across the commonwealth. In addition to telling this statewide story, the poster will use georeferenced maps and historic photographs to tell a variety of local stories. The poster cannot reproduce the scale of the website, which features unique webpages for 95 counties and 38 independent cities, but select examples can nevertheless gesture toward the scale of this project. I have documented the names and exact locations of more than 5,000 public schools in Virginia history, including more than 2,500 one-room schools. This project captures the history of rural education with unprecedented granularity. Consider, for example, that whereas previous censuses counted 382 Rosenwald schools scattered across Virginia, my project has identified the names and locations of more than 1,800 schools for Black students in Virginia. The poster will also contain QR codes that allow AHA attendees to explore the website for themselves, and it will also provide resources explaining how interested parties can develop similar projects for their respective states. Ultimately, the poster will argue that school consolidation has had a profound and underappreciated effect on the history of public education in Virginia, the South, and the rest of the United States.