Charlotte, North Carolina: The Siloam School is one of Mecklenburg County's oldest surviving Black schoolhouses and one of the few remaining Rosenwald-era schools in the region. The original building used a Rosenwald floor plan, with the cost of construction covered by the Black community.

Originally a school for Black children in Jim Crow Charlotte, the one-room building made its debut as an education space June 15, 2024 at the Charlotte Museum of History. An eight-year fundraising and restoration campaign took the historic building from near-collapse to teaching asset. The restored building – one of five such structures on the Museum of History’s 8-acre campus in east Charlotte – will become a center for history education and programming.
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About Siloam School

Siloam School was built around 1920 to replace an earlier school that was most likely a log structure. Like most of the Black schools of the time, the school was built by the community, utilizing their talents as carpenters and tradesmen.

The school was named after Siloam Presbyterian Church, located just north of the school, and served the Black students who lived in the rural Mallard Creek neighborhood. Though Siloam School was built by members of the community, the county school system provided and paid a salary to the instructor and janitor/caretaker and the students were registered in the county school system.

County records for the 1924-25 school year indicate there were 72 Black children living in the Siloam district, but only 63 were registered at the school. Average daily attendance was 39 students that year.

In other years, between 40-60 students were registered at the school, with the average daily attendance falling somewhere between 20 and more than 30 each day. Two of the teachers, Margaret Gilliard (1922-23) and Mattie Osborne (1923-25), lived in Charlotte and commuted to Siloam by bus and by foot each day.
Ms. Gilliard traveled from Ward 1 on N Caldwell St, a journey of more than ten miles. Mrs. Osborne lived closer, just south of what is now UNC Charlotte.

One of the janitors, Nelson Young walked five miles from his home to the school to light the coal stove and get water from the nearby spring before students arrived each day. His son, James, attended the school as a child in the 1930s while his father worked there.

As the school system expanded, one-room schools like Siloam were gradually replaced with new buildings that separated grades. At some point prior to 1947, Siloam School ceased operations and the students moved to different schools in North Charlotte and the county began looking for a buyer for the property.

The Young family, who had attended and cared for the structure since the 1930s, bought the school in 1951, led by their father James Young. The Young family converted the structure into a home for their family, then later an auto garage. After the 1980s, the structure was no longer used by the family.

In the early 2000s, the property was purchased by a developer and turned into a sprawling apartment complex which now looms over the one-room school.
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Sources: The Charlotte Post; The Charlotte Museum of History