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Bennett Grove School emerges from brush
Historic one-room school has future plans
Bennett Grove School-Crew
This squad of GSU Anthropological Society students, faculty members and Willow Hill Heritage and Renaissance Center volunteers recently removed vegetation to uncover the Bennett Grove School. The squad includes, left to right, GSU Sociology and Anthropology faculty members Dr. Jared Wood and Inger Wood, student Tyler Ormsby, community volunteer Clayton Walker, students Breanna Cooper and David Wiseman, Willow Hill Center Development Director Dr. Gayle Jackson, student Amanda Shively, Willow Hill Center board member Tendai Haggins (in back), and students Courtney Carver, Stephanie Ingram and Jason Joiner. The Willow Hill Centers chairman, Bulloch County Commissioner Ray Mosley, also visited the site. - photo by AL HACKLE/Staff
The rickety shell of the Bennett Grove School — Bulloch County's only known, extant one-room schoolhouse for black children from the long period when separate clearly wasn't equal — recently emerged from a thicket of bushes and small trees.Seven students from the Georgia Southern University Anthropological Society, led by a couple of their teachers and assisted by a few community volunteers, cleared the vegetation in a morning.This left the building leaning against a thin pine, as it has apparently done for years. Unpainted inside and out except for the door, the schoolhouse, built around 1918, never had electric lights or indoor plumbing. Using a bucket and pulley, children drew water from a still-existing shallow well.
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