Students in Auburn University’s 2008-09 class of the Design-Build master’s program have recently graduated and are going their separate ways. However, their collective work outside the classroom while at Auburn will leave an indelible mark on one Macon County community.

The 12 students in the program, under the guidance of D. K. Ruth, director of the College of Architecture, Design and Construction’s Design-Build program, and Anthony Tindill, visiting assistant professor in the McWhorter School of Building Science, dedicated the past year to helping restore the Shiloh-Rosenwald School. Built in the 1920s, the three-room, wood frame building provided a place to educate African American children in Notasulga and the surrounding area for more than 40 years until federally mandated integration.

The project actually began nearly 90 years ago when the school and similar facilities were born out of a collaboration of African American educator Booker T. Washington and Sears and Roebuck president Julius Rosenwald. Concerned about the state of education for African Americans in the south, the two developed a partnership to build schools for rural African American youths. In 1917, Rosenwald created the Julius Rosenwald Foundation, donating millions of dollars to public schools, colleges and universities.

Amazingly, 5,300 rural schools and teachers’ homes were cooperatively built with assistance from the local African American communities. Donations of land and labor by the local community were matched by financial contributions from the Foundation. The Shiloh community in Macon County was one of the beneficiaries of the foundation’s funding. Built in the 1920s, Rosenwald schools served as prototypes for the initiative to make education available in poor communities. In 2002, the schools were placed on the list of 11 endangered places by the national Trust for Historic Preservation. Of the Rosenwald schools built in Macon County, only the Shiloh school is still standing.

Three years ago, Elizabeth Sims, a graduate of the Shiloh-Rosenwald school, formed the Shiloh Community Restoration Foundation to help restore the school and maintain the Shiloh Cemetery and the Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church, which sits next to the school and played an integral role in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The foundation coordinated the effort to restore and reopen the school as a museum and community center.

“When this small grassroots organization was formed, I knew that it would be difficult to raise the kind of money we needed for the project or hire the caliber of experts required to get the project done,” Sims said. “My next thought was to form collaborations.” Sims contacted Royrickers Cook, Auburn’s vice president for outreach, and explained the group’s mission.

“Dr. Cook was so impressed with what we were doing that he gave us partial funding and contacted Dr. D. K. Ruth about the program” she said.

Ruth and the Design-Build students took on the project and provided drawings, estimates and a historical architect to assess the building. Then the students, along with Tindill, created a comprehensive plan for an adaptive reuse renovation/rehabilitation that balanced saving the building’s historically significant features with providing an energy efficient building.

Sims expressed a need for an area with access to computers, restrooms, a museum to house Shiloh’s historical artifacts and a gathering space to be used for community events. The students consulted with the Alabama Historical Commission to ensure that the history of the building was kept intact while providing modern updates to the space.

In partnership with undergraduate architecture students from Tuskegee University, Design-Build students restored and replaced the original six foot, double hung windows, discovered and repaired major structural failures in the front wall of the school, and created a technology/community room, the Elizabeth Ware Sims Community Resource Center, including new bathrooms and new electrical and HVAC systems.

“The [Design-Build] students are 12 of the brightest and most talented bunch of students I have ever had the pleasure to work with,” Sims said. “They have been amazing! Their names and pictures will be permanently hung in the technology center. There is so much I could tell you about this project and how amazing the students are, and how much of a difference they have made in the lives of the people in the Shiloh Community and in my life.”

The Shiloh Community Restoration Foundation is currently working to have the entire Shiloh site, which includes the school, the Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church and the Shiloh Cemetery, listed as Alabama Historical Sites and declared as national landmarks.