Deep into Pungo, a one-room schoolhouse surrounded by farmland stands just steps away from traffic speeding by on Princess Anne Road.
The schoolhouse is a study in tidy lines.
Steps lead up to a red door set into a small, white, gabled building. Inside, two rows of child-sized desks proceed from a metal stove and stove pipe at the back of the room to a slate chalkboard and teacher’s desk at the front. The flag features a neat grid of 48 stars. Six windows, three on each side, allow natural light to enter.
Today, the whoosh of cars and trucks echoes around the wood-slat walls and ceilings of the Pleasant Ridge School.
But when class was in session, from around 1886 until 1956, students who attended remembered the bell going “ding-a-ling-a-ling” to start the day.
“I remember the little schoolhouse, I remember just running around the schoolhouse. That was a way of playing,” said Georgia Allen in an interview with WHRO.
Allen, 71, did not attend the school, but her older siblings did.
The Pleasant Ridge School educated Black students for 70 years before Virginia’s schools were integrated. The current structure, which replaced the original building after it burned in a fire around 1918, is believed to be the last standing one-room schoolhouse in Virginia Beach.
The school, along with the Asbury Christian Fellowship Church next door and the cemetery behind it, earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in October.
Allen helped researchers find alumni of the school to interview for an oral history for the registration to the National Register. Her recollections of the school and church were also included in the oral history.
The school and church played an important role in not just education, but in bringing together people from small Black communities dotted through Virginia Beach, or what was then Princess Anne County, Allen said.
Allen’s father was the pastor at Asbury Christian Fellowship Church when she was a child, and she remembered revivals at the church that brought people together. Kids weren’t allowed to run around the church, she said, but the schoolhouse was fair game as a place to have fun.
“What I remember most is coming and sitting on the steps, just having conversations with your friends. It was kind of a gathering place for young people,” Allen recalled.
“The Pleasant Ridge School is highly representative of the African American educational experience in Princess Anne County during the first half of the twentieth century,” reads the registration form, a document that compiles historical research about the site.
It’s a not-too-distant history that’s important to preserve, Allen said.
Education in Princess Anne County
Ten interviews contributed to the oral history. Along with the ringing of the bell, former students remembered walking to school along train tracks. They recalled drawing hopscotch in the dirt during recess, the smell of peaches cooking on the stove and lessons taught by strict yet loving instructors.
The small size of the classroom, with desk space for about 16 students, meant the school day was divided into two halves. First through third grades were taught in the morning, and fourth through seventh grade in the afternoon. Allen said older students in each section were accustomed to helping younger students, and younger students gleaned information from older students’ lessons.
One-room schoolhouses in Virginia were typical beginning in the 1800s after state law mandated the establishment of a public school system. By 1886, there were 21 schools for white students and 10 schools for Black students in Princess Anne County, according to the Historic Register entry.
Pleasant Ridge School was established around that time, and stood next to the Asbury Christian Fellowship Church until it burned down around 1918. A nearby school for white students had recently closed, and one of its two rooms was moved to become the new Pleasant Ridge School building, which remains there today.
Pleasant Ridge School closed in 1956 when Seaboard Elementary School consolidated several small schools for Black students, two years after the passage of Brown v. Board of Education, though Virginia Beach didn’t begin integrating schools until1962.
“I love this little schoolhouse”
Alumni and local churches organized fundraising efforts in the 1990s to help preserve the school building. The Pleasant Ridge School got a new foundation to lift it off the ground. More recent fundraising and a state grant will go toward replacing the roof, according to Mark Reed, the Historic Preservation Planner with the city’s Planning and Community Development department.
The school and church were first entered into the Virginia Landmarks Register in June, and later the National Register.
The Pleasant Ridge School speaks to the history of segregation, Reed said, and what Black residents did to obtain education under an unjust system.
“The character of our city is represented in its historic resources,” Reed said. “We certainly value the history of our African American community, and the Pleasant Ridge School is probably one of the few resources that really remain to speak about that.”
Allen hopes to organize a capital campaign to provide a stipend to volunteers and open the school to visitors. The building represents history, but also the potential for change, she said.
“I love this little schoolhouse. It means a lot to me because it reminds me of the fact that you always must be in a mindset of transformation,” Allen said.
“You can’t stay in one place. You need to know where you came from and that you too can change, you can grow, and you can bring about a change for the better.”
