Sloop Point Elementary School

Sloop Point Elementary School is one of the only Rosenwald Schools left standing the North Carolina. It is settled next to the Manhollow Missionary Baptist Church and is an important landmark to the Edgecomb Community. The following is an excerpt from Curtis Hardison's Manuscript, who is a descendent of Tuney and Janey, first-generation enslaved. Sloop Point School is located at 55 Manhollow Church Rd, Hampstead, NC 28443.

In total over 5,300 Rosenwald buildings were constructed in fifteen Southern states with over 800 being erected in North Carolina (more than in any other state). One of the eighteen Rosenwald schools in Pender County was a one room schoolhouse constructed next to the Manhollow Missionary Baptist Church: expressly for the purpose of providing a primary education for black children in the community.

Sloop Point Elementary School.

In order to raise the required matching funds to begin construction of the school, the Manhollow congregation and community successfully organized and conducted fundraising drives which included bake sales, fish and chicken fry’s, and oyster roasts with proceeds going into the church building fund. In 1920, a piece of land was acquired next to the church for construction of the schoolhouse that would provide a proper primary education through the sixth grade for children of the community.

Construction of the Sloop Point School was completed in 1921 and today is one of the eight remaining historic Rosenwald School buildings in Pender County, North Carolina. Practically every person that lives in the community today either attended or descended from the early attendees of the Sloop Point Elementary School. They also comprise most of the current membership of the historic Manhollow Missionary Baptist Church that was constructed fifty-two years earlier in 1869.

The one room schoolhouse had no electricity and the only illumination within the building was provided by several large nine over nine windows that allowed an abundance of ambient light to flood the interior of the building. The rear of the school had an elevated stage that provided a platform for speakers to address the room. The stage could be closed off from the rest of the one room building by a heavy curtain that could be pulled to the sides of the stage for school plays, graduations, and community events. The teacher's desk was placed at the end of the room near the stage. The teacher during my years of attendance (1952 through 1956) was Mrs. Lilly Mae Billingsleigh (Mibislay, as everyone in the community referred to her) and she ruled the school with absolute unquestioned authority, dishing out corporal punishment with one half of a used car fan belt when the need arose. If the reason for punishment was considered severe enough for the offender's parent to get involved, Mibislay would pin a note to the child's clothing with the admonishment that the note had better be pinned to the garment when the child arrived home. This usually insured that the child received a much more severe punishment by the parents and or grandparents, because no one...absolutely no one questioned or second guessed Mibislay or her authority in the schoolhouse. The only provision for receiving an education beyond the sixth grade was at another Rosenwald school in the county, which was constructed eighteen miles away in Rocky Point.

At Sloop Point, first and second grades were usually taught on the elevated stage at the rear of the building and the rest of the grades were aligned in rows in front of the teacher’s desk with the lower classes in front and the higher classes positioned by-class in the rear of the first row. Average class size was three to seven students and students walked from distances as far as four to five miles in order to attend school. The school was provided with desks and books that were no longer used by modern, brick, multi-floor schools for white children in the county. A lone pot belly cast iron stove was strategically positioned near the stage, on one side of the building to provide heat for the entire building during the winter months. The teacher's desk was positioned near the front of the room opposite of the pot belly stove.

Mibisley was the primary teacher during my four years at the one room school and she provided classroom instruction for the second through sixth grades. During winter months she would designate one of the older boys, (fifth or sixth graders) that lived close to the school to arrive early to unlock the doors for arriving students. I vaguely remember my first-grade teacher, a much older woman by the name of Mrs. Black. I was deathly afraid of her.

Regardless of weather conditions, students walked to and from school, usually in small groups, so needless-to-say, during rainy weather, students arrived at school drenched with rain. During winter months, the student that opened the school each day was given the additional responsibility of starting a fire in the pot belly heater to begin warming the school before the other students arrived. If the weather was cold enough to freeze water in the pipe of the hand operated pump that provided the only drinkable water for the school, then the student in charge of opening the door was also tasked with placing wood around the frozen pump supply pipe and starting a small fire for the purpose of melting accumulated ice in the pipe to allow water to flow through the pipe when the pump handle was operated. This was a very important task during winter months because as we arrived at school, we had to go to the pump and have cold water pumped over our hands before we were allowed to enter the warmth of the building. The purpose of pumping water over our hands was to allow the water to remove any frost, ice crystals or frozen moisture from our hands, otherwise if we held our partially frozen hands too close to the red-hot pot belly heater, the combination of cold flesh and extreme heat from the heater would almost certainly result in great pain as hands warmed from freezing or near freezing temperatures.

Neighboring Onslow County, probably due to the presence of the Camp Lejune Marine Base, placed a higher priority on educating children of color than Pender County did. With and the rapid expansion of Camp Lejune after the closure and dismantling of Camp Davis in 1944, Jacksonville and the surrounding area experienced unprecedented growth and an ever-increasing dependency on the military base for economic stability and growth.

A modern multi-level brick schoolhouse was constructed to provide education to children of color from elementary through high school. However, no transportation was provided for black students from Holly Ridge, or from a very small, isolated community known as Stump Sound, several miles further away. Three black families lived in Holly Ridge and members of the extended Bragg family had settled into Stump Sound and begun rebuilding their lives as free men women and children after the end of slavery. The Bragg homestead consisted of five family groups.

The only available option for children of color from Holly Ridge and the isolated community of Stump Sound to obtain an elementary education was to cross the county line and attend classes at the one room school in our community. Those students walked the five miles from their homes to our school following a combination of rutted roads, meandering foot paths and animal trails through the woods in a serpentine pattern in order to attend school.

Recess was a highly anticipated time at the little schoolhouse, because it presented an opportunity for us to get outside and play, just as kids do today. Lunches would be retrieved from under desks and half pint containers of milk would be distributed to children that had purchased them for three cents. each child’s lunch usually consisted of leftovers from their previous night’s dinner or peanut butter and apple butter sandwiches. Children traded food items and shared with those that didn’t have lunch or had forgotten to bring their lunch to school. Boys would usually meander into the wooded area in front of the school that was almost always wet because water run-off from the highway would accumulate in the low-lying area. Baseball, football, and games of rough house would usually be played by the boys while girls played jacks on the schoolhouse floor, engaged in jump rope and double dutch, or gathered around long tufts of grass on the lawn and practice hair braiding techniques with the long grass stems. Boys would be admonished not to get their shoes and pants muddy and Mibislay waited with fan belt in hand when recess was over to punish the ‘bad boys’ that came out of the wooded area with excessive mud on their feet and clothes.

My parents were among the early generations to attend Sloop Point Elementary School and I was in the last generation to attend before the Rosenwald community schools in Pender County were permanently closed in 1957. That’s when the county constructed a new, modern, fully equipped consolidated elementary school for black children to attend. Annandale Consolidated Elementary School was constructed in the nearby community of Hampstead to provide primary education for children from five surrounding communities through the eighth grade. The school was centrally located to allow children from the farming communities of Edgecombe, Woodside, Topsail, Brown Town and Harrison Creek to attend the consolidated elementary school that not only had modern electric lighting but central heat, running water, indoor bathrooms, linoleum tiled floors, lots of windows and an assembly hall! The new school was a dream come true for teachers, students, and parents. Along with a new consolidated school, came new school buses and new books and desks for the classrooms. When Annandale opened its doors, Mrs. Billingsley became the fifth-grade teacher and for the first time in her career she could focus on teaching only one grade and one subject at a time. I attended Annandale from the fifth through eighth grades before graduating and transferring to the Rosenwald Pender County Training School (PCTS) eighteen miles away in Rocky Point. PCTS was one of the high schools in the county that provided curriculum for African American children attending grades one through 12.