Gifford Rosenwald School

Front: Gifford Rosenwald School, sometimes called Gifford Colored School, was built here in 1920-21. It was one of 500 rural schools built for African-American students in S.C., founded in part by the Julius Rosenwald Foundation from 1917 to 1932. The first of four Rosenwald schools in Hampton County, it was a two-room frame building constructed at a cost of $3,225. Reverse: Gifford Rosenwald School had two to five teachers for an average of almost 200 students a year in grades 1-9 until it closed in 1958. That year a new school serving Gifford and Luray, built by an equalization program seeking to preserve school segregation, replaced the 1921 school. The old school has been used for church services and Sunday school classes since 1958.