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3 <br /> OMB Approval No.1024-0018 <br /> (8-86) <br /> United States Department of the Interior <br /> National Park Service <br /> National Register of Historic Places <br /> Continuation Sheet <br /> Section number 8 Page 10 Cedar Grove School <br /> Orange County,North Carolina <br /> Summary <br /> Cedar Grove School in rural Orange County was completed in 1951 with additions in 1953, 1958, and 1960. <br /> From the time the Orange County Board of Education purchased the land for its construction in 1946 until <br /> 1954,the school was referred to as Cedar Grove Negro School. After 1954,the school board and local <br /> newspapers called it Cedar Grove School or Cedar Grove Elementary School. Cedar Grove School holds <br /> significance on the local level for the period 1951,the year of construction,to 1969,when county schools <br /> integrated and the county school board closed Cedar Grove School. <br /> Cedar Grove School meets National Register of Historic Places Criterion A in the areas of education and <br /> black ethnic heritage as a facility providing early education to African American students in northern rural <br /> Orange County from 1951 to 1969. The school's history chronicles the advancement of African American <br /> education in rural Orange County in the mid-twentieth century in the context of a segregated school system. <br /> Cedar Grove School, as an important pre-integration elementary school, evokes the period in Orange <br /> County when African American students,parents,teachers, and administrators struggled for their schools <br /> to receive funding,materials, and buildings comparable to white schools. The school dates to the period <br /> when Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka(1954) found separate schools for whites and African <br /> Americans unconstitutional, a landmark case that signaled the beginning of a long period of defiance by <br /> white school boards across the South. Brown and the Civil Rights Act of 1964,which outlawed segregation, <br /> required school systems to integrate, something that did not happen in Orange County until 1969. Cedar <br /> Grove School is also eligible under Criterion C for architecture as a locally significant example of <br /> modernism as applied to a public school building. Designed by architect Archie Royal Davis, Cedar Grove <br /> School's low slung, flat-roofed form with copious windows to allow natural light into the classrooms <br /> epitomized modernist school design in North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s. <br /> Historical Background <br /> In March 1935, a committee of African American residents of the Carr, White Oak, Harmony, Cedar Grove, <br /> and Sartin school districts—all in northern Orange County—appeared before the county's board of <br /> education to request consolidation of their districts and construction of a new brick building north of <br /> Hillsborough. At the time,African American children throughout Orange County attended classes in one of <br /> twenty-eight small, often overcrowded and inadequate frame buildings. Ten consolidated schools, only one <br /> of them frame, served the county's white students. At Carr School,two teachers instructed eighty-two <br /> African American first through seventh graders. The single teacher at Harmony School taught sixty first <br />