In 1881, William Jasper and his wife Georgiana deeded one-half acre of land from their thirteen-acre farm to the local Franconia school district. Jasper, a former slave, cited in a Freedman's Register as a black man 5 foot 6 ½ inches high, scar on the back of the left hand, scar on the ankle, joined Middleton Braxton, George Carroll, Thornton Gray and others in the community to address an urgent need - the education of their children.
Former slaves built the one-room schoolhouse. Parents, grandparents, and neighbors provided the materials and labor. They hired teachers, scraped together funds to purchase books and donated a piano and furnishings for the schoolroom.
The enthusiasm and pride of the colored teachers, parents, and the African American community prevailed against the resistance and harassment of the county's white residents. Laurel Grove students remember closing the shutters of their school to prevent rocks from breaking windows. Yet, in this segregated school, without the facilities and supplies, Laurel Grove students learned geography without maps and competed successfully with their peers in colored fairs. A few followed the example of teachers, earning certificates to educate new generations of children in the county's segregated public schools.
Closed in 1932, the Laurel Grove School has been restored by family descendants and interested citizens to tell the unique story of the community's refusal to narrow its ambitions. Of all the colored schools opened in the region, only Laurel Grove exists today as the prized possession of a striving people, a "living museum" available to area schools and the general public.
In the 1990s, northern Virginia's suburban sprawl might have destroyed three landmarks of an African-American community that had sprung to life after 1877, the end of Reconstruction: The Laurel Grove Colored School, Baptist Church, and Cemetery. However, once real estate developers Mark and Barbara Fried began the title search on 23 acres of land near the Franconia Metro Station, they discovered that 13 of these acres had been in the Jasper-Walker family since 1860, and one building on the property had been a one-room school for local African American children. Recognizing that this history was important, and wanting to uncover the story of the families and community whose children attended the school, the Fried Company restored the building and supported the initial historical research that followed.
Under the direction of the Laurel Grove School Association, and with several grants from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, an interdisciplinary team of community members, curriculum experts, teachers, historians, and museum curators recovered the history of this school from oral histories and local archives, and refurbished the classroom. This team also crafted a fourth grade history curriculum to study the institution of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and life under a segregated “Jim Crow” system—a curriculum that later was adapted to middle and high school curricula.
Source: Laurel Grove School Association
At the time of submission, the school was closed to the public due to the COVID-19 pandemic; the schoolhouse museum is normally open Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays from 10-2 and also offers hands-on educational programs for students.