Piece of history needs repairs

The floor of the Boyds Negro School sustained heavy termite and weather damage

Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Brian Lewis⁄The Gazette Our House volunteers (foreground from left) Gordon Glover, Carlos Oritz and Christopher Griffen-Scott and (background from left) Lorenzo Pendleton and Andrew Davis, work to remove the termite damaged floor at the Boyds Negro School.

Right now the 111-year-old building, which is used regularly for classes and other meetings, is without a floor.

It was torn out in recent weeks when a noticeable sag led to the discovery of severe termite damage and rot in the support joists underneath, which rest directly on the ground.

‘‘As we’ve found out more, it seems like a bigger and bigger project every time,” said Elaine Fors-MacKellar, president of the Boyds Historical Society, the school’s steward for the past 20 years.

The group is seeking about $10,000 to purchase materials to repair the small gray building on White Ground Road, which served the area’s black children for 40 years at the turn of the 20th century.

Fors-MacKellar said volunteers noticed in the spring that the school’s floor was sagging and contacted Our House, a residential job-training center for at-risk teenagers in Brookeville, to assess the problem.

Our House workers determined that the entire floor had to removed, the joists replaced or protected and a moisture barrier lain down, she said.

‘‘We were all sort of chagrined to see the damage that was under the floor,” she said. ‘‘The large joists that support the whole building are very deteriorated, there’s sawdust from the termites and everything.”

Our House estimated that materials will cost $7,000 to $10,000, well above the funds the historical society has on hand.

The Our House volunteers pulled up the entire floor and cleared out the schoolhouse before Thanksgiving to prepare for the renovations, pending money for supplies, said Jane Mote, vice president of the historical society.

The society supplements donations it receives by selling items at the Germantown flea market, near the MARC train station, and has already depleted it funds for the schoolhouse.

It spends about $600 per year on insurance and about $100 per month for the climate-control system to preserve the school’s archives.

A termite treatment in September cost about $1,200.

And the group spent money last January to pay for a fresh coat of paint on the building after it was spray painted with hate graffiti. County police have not solved that crime.

‘‘This is the biggest expense for us ever,” Mote said.

The issue comes at a time when the historical society is trying to increase visibility of the school, which sits on the side of a country road. The group hosted a fall Heritage Days celebration and Black History month events there this year.

The school served students in grades one through eight from 1895 to 1936 and was a private home for several decades. The society purchased it in 1981 and it was restored in 1989.

Society members thought the work on the schoolhouse was just about finished, needing only to build a wheelchair ramp.

Children in weekly Sunday school classes from the nearby St. Mark’s United Methodist Church and adults attending regular Alcoholics Anonymous meetings who use currently the schoolhouse will meet in a different location until the work is complete.

It can’t happen soon enough for Fors-MacKellar.

‘‘I teach eighth-graders some of these stories about segregation and the 1800s and what it’s all like,” said Fors-MacKellar, a teacher at Redland Middle School in Rockville. ‘‘It’s something that seems very out of place to today’s perspective, but it’s very important to keep that history here.”