Cadentown Rosenwald School

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

The Cadentown school, boarded up, photographed for the survey in July 2004. Doerrfeld and Rapier, Historic American Buildings Survey. Library of Congress.

A two-room frame schoolhouse outside Lexington, Kentucky, built in 1922 and 1923 by a Black farming community that had to buy its own school before anyone would help pay for it. That was the arrangement. Julius Rosenwald, who ran Sears, Roebuck, put up money to build schools for Black children across the segregated South — but only as a matching share. The community had to raise cash of its own first, and the county had to agree to take the building into its school system and keep it running. Roughly five thousand schools went up under that program. Every one of them started with families who did not have much money deciding to spend it on a floor, a roof, and a row of windows. Cadentown's building cost about three thousand dollars. Five hundred of that came from the Rosenwald Fund. The rest came from the county and from the people who lived there. Look at the windows in these photographs and you are looking at the whole argument. Rosenwald schools were designed around them — long banks of glass on one wall, set to catch the light, because these were buildings for places with no electricity and the school day had to run on the sun. The plans specified which direction the building should face. Somebody stood in a field in Fayette County with a compass and got that right. The community of Cadentown was founded by freed people after the Civil War. The school stood at the center of it, and it is still standing. There are people alive who went to schools like this one, and people whose grandparents did. If Cadentown is your family's place — if you sat in that room, or your mother did, or you know the name of a teacher who taught in it — please add it here. Buildings get surveyed. The rest has to be told. Photographs: Historic American Buildings Survey, HABS KY-288, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain.