Members of JABA’s Southern Albemarle Community Center eating lunch together in the former cafeteria of the Yancy School.
JABA's Southern Albemarle Community Center members are busy creating a map on a whiteboard of Porter's Road in Esmont on either side of Route 6 from memory, naming the schools, churches, grocery stores, beauty salons, car garages, and other businesses in the historically tight-knit rural Black community in Southern Albemarle County. Thomas Store, Feggans Barber Shop, Esmont Hotel, Cozy Corner, Paige's Garage, the Cary Sawmill...
"This one road supported itself," said Karl Bolden, a JABA center member who grew up in Esmont along Porters Road in the 1960s. "I didn't see poor people here. If somebody needed help, somebody helped them. We all supported each other."
Following the Civil War a community of African-Americans remained in Esmont to buy land, start businesses, farm, and work as domestics and laborers for the families that once enslaved them, forming a largely self- subsistent community. UVA's Esmont Oral History Project has documented the extreme poverty they endured, but it also documented the community's resilience and collaboration.
Parents, teachers, and community leaders had to successfully sue the local government to buy the land for what would become Esmont High School in 1904, and later Benjamin F. Yancey Elementary School in 1960, named for the educator who led the original effort to build the school. Sadly, the Albemarle County School Board decided to close Yancey Elementary School in 2017, citing declining enrollment, making it the first time in over 100 years there wasn't a school in Esmont. The school building has since become a community center and home to JABA's Southern Albemarle Community Center, which relocated from Scottsville.
Center member Loraine Paige says she walked to Esmont High School in the late 1940s and remembers baseball and softball games, bands and concerts, and other activities at the school, which was a central hub of the community. She would finish her last two years of high school at segregated Jackson P. Burley High School in Charlottesville, which opened in 1951. Ironically, when integration arrived in 1967, white students in the Esmont area attended the formerly segregated Yancey Elementary School, while everyone else went to Albemarle High School.
Clearly, the creation of area segregated schools, and later integration, was challenging for young people growing up in Esmont, who not only felt the rural versus city tensions having to attend segregated schools in Charlottesville but also the racial tensions when they integrated.
"That's when the culture shock really hit me," said Bolden, describing the move to Albemarle High School for the first time.
Thelma Moore, a JABA Activities Assistant at the center, who was living in Earlysville when the school integrated, recalled that she and her siblings had to stand on the school bus because they were prevented from sitting down.
"I had to fight on that bus almost every day," said Moore, describing herself as the bolder of her siblings, " and I fought and fought and fought until they finally learned to let us sit down."
Today, the JABA center members admit that the Esmont community isn't as tight-knit as it once was, that people buying up land and property aren't necessarily aware of the area's history and that a majority of community members who remember or recognize Esmont's history are retired and aging.
"This is still a thriving community with a rich history," insists center member Graham Paige, who grew up in Esmont and taught in local schools for 30 years after getting his Masters at UVA. As a former Albemarle County School Board member, he was one of two members who voted not to close
Yancey Elementary School. He hopes the Yancey Community Center can help preserve the community's legacy and that the County will focus on the area.
"We could use some small businesses located here in Esmont," Paige suggested. Other members chimed in saying better transportation options, rural medical services, and more services for older people who want to stay in their homes were priorities.
Thanks to an exhibit at the entrance of the school and center programming that highlights Esmont's history, the Yancey School Community Center is indeed helping to keep the community's legacy intact.
Loraine Paige just hopes it remains intact in people's hearts.
"Right now, people check on me, people watch out for each other around her," she said, " but is that going to be wiped out as the community changes?"
David McNair handles communications, media relations, and social media efforts for JABA. This story originally appeared in C-Ville.