The one room school on Second Street served Waterford’s Black students from 1867 when it was built until 1957 when students were bussed into Leesburg. Sometimes serving over 60 students at once, many of whom were over 16 years old, the small space was filled with students eager to learn. Teachers and students alike worked hard to make the most of their new educational opportunities after Emancipation, as witnessed by a May 1884 visitor who shared his experience in the Loudoun Telephone:
‘On Friday evening last the Waterford colored school closed, at the end of an eight months’ session with Prof. Edw. F. Arnold as principal, Miss Mollie Saunders, assistant, and Messrs. Roberson [Robinson], Boyd, and Minor, Directors.
‘The exercises clearly showed progress in the school, which was due to the untiring efforts of the teachers and directors together, with some assistance from interested patrons. Recitations, dialogues, music &c., were the order of the evening. A public examination of the pupils convinced the visitors of stores of knowledge fastened in their minds during the session.–The reading by some of the pupils would put to blush some of the scholars in our white schools. It was done with confidence and boldness. The singing, with all respect to the white folks, was so superior as to compare with the squeaking of a wheelbarrow and the notes of the woodthrush. Special praise in this direction is due to Miss Saunders, whose throat seemed to contain a harp of a thousand c[h]ords.
‘Flowers were displayed in great profusion and very tastefully arranged. The children were genteel in appearance and dignified in deportment….”
– Loudoun Telephone, 16 May 1884; as quoted in A Rock in a Weary Land, A Shelter in a Time of Storm, Souders and Souders, 2003.
Learn more about Waterford’s African-American heritage in A Rock in a Weary Land, A Shelter in a Time of Storm, available online here.