Efforts to Preserve Historic Schools Featured in Cooperative Living Magazine

The February 2021 issue of Cooperative Living magazine features the efforts to preserve historic schools in Campbell County, VA and Courtland, VA.

After more than 60 years, Delores Nash-Hicks was back in fourth grade, and she could not have been more delighted. Her old classroom in the Campbell County Training School Complex looked almost new, with freshly painted walls, gleaming hardwood floors and high-banked, reglazed windows that bathed photographs and mementoes in natural light.

Her memories were just as fresh. Departing before dawn on the long bus ride that would take her from the tiny community of New London, va., to the school, set aside for Black education in the Jim Crow era. How students lined up to march through her classroom to the lunchroom to take once-a-year health pills. Walking up the hill to the privy. The woodstovbe that provided heat. The love of the teachers.

"I can't explain it. It's exhilarating. It's happiness," she says.