You may know Hickory Hill as a community center whose acreage was selected as the site of a firefighter training burn tower before the city of Richmond withdrew its absurd plan amid civic outcry. But Hickory Hill — a former school building absorbed by Richmond as part of its 1970 annexation of a portion of Chesterfield County— is much more than that.

It’s a crucible of rich history and a memorial to a formidable but undercelebrated educator and civil rights leader. It's the site of an important court victory that set the table for Brown v. Board of Education. And it's a monument to the fortitude of a Black community determined to educate its children, despite a dearth of resources and cooperation from the county.

Less than a year after Hickory Hill was deemed insignificant by City Hall, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources begged to differ. On June 20, it approved the 1938 school building for inclusion on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places.

"The history of the school provides insight into the extraordinary efforts undertaken by Black families, community members, and educators to provide a quality education for their youths in the face of great adversity," its nomination form states.  

Chesterfield resident Bernard Anderson and South Richmond resident Monica Esparza led the historic designation quest for the one-story brick Colonial Revival school with several additions — an effort that gained heightened urgency after the city's fire tower push. The community-based researchers were assisted by local historian Charles Pool and Joanna McKnight, an architectural historian with VDHR.

The story of Hickory Hill School is about a people who wouldn't be denied, despite unfair and unreasonable obstacles being placed in their way, even as they provided land and cash for school construction and fought largely in vain to get school officials in Chesterfield — then 480 square miles — to provide transportation to the school.  

“That’s what makes it a very unique story — the self-sufficiency," Esparza said. 

James Preston Spencer, a founder of the Virginia Voters League and Hickory Hill's principal for three decades, frequently petitioned the Chesterfield School Board for equitable bus transportation, better facilities, textbooks, a nine-month school term and more teachers at his school. 

Spencer's demands for equitable pay for African American teachers in Chesterfield culminated in a successful federal lawsuit by three Hickory Hill teachers and the Virginia NAACP — 1948's Freeman v. County School Board. 

According to the Text Message blog of the National Archives, 91% of white teachers received salaries equal to or higher than the maximum paid Black teacher during the 1946-47 school year, during a time when 52% of Black teachers held degrees compared to 29% of white teachers.

"The judge declared that discrimination between salaries paid to white and Black teachers in Chesterfield County existed, and it was based solely on race," wrote archivist Grace Schultz in May 2022. "The judge ordered the school district to equalize the salaries of white and Black teachers, but left how to determine pay equality to the school district."

Plaintiff Arthur M. Freeman and Spencer both paid a price for the lawsuit; Freeman was fired from his teaching job at Hickory Hill before ultimately landing as a professor at Howard University, and Spencer was passed over as principal of a new Black high school, George Washington High in Chester.    

Anderson had been researching Chesterfield's Black history since returning to the county from Northern Virginia after his retirement as a federal employee. 

“My family has been in Chesterfield County for generations," said Anderson, 77. "And when my parents were growing up, Hickory Hill was the one possibility they had to obtain a high school education."

Anderson said his father, Walter Anderson Sr., attended Hickory Hill High for 1 1/2 years before dropping out because he couldn't find a reliable means of getting to the school from his home on the western edge of Chesterfield — roughly a 20-mile trip. 

Hickory Hill's roots can be traced by to the aftermath of the Civil War, according to records by the Freedmen's Bureau. The VDHR report cites a one-room schoolhouse for Black students dating back to 1869.  

In 1915, the School Board built a four-room frame Hickory Hill School for elementary students on 1 1/2 acres of land donated by the African American Educational League Association.

In 1924, the Chesterfield School Board decided to move the County Training School — the only school in rural Virginia offering high school-level work to Black students — from what is now Virginia State University to Hickory Hill. This move led to the construction of a new Rosenwald School and a shop building at the Hickory Hill site.

That Rosenwald School would be one of more than 5,000 built for Black students in the rural South between 1912 and 1932 — an effort that began as a collaboration between Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and Booker T. Washington, the Black educator who founded Tuskegee Institute. 

The VDHR report describes the inequity Hickory Hill residents faced in such an endeavor:

"The Rosenwald fund provided $700 for the new structure, and the Black community raised $500 for the school. Additionally, the Black community was required to loan the School Board between $1,000 and $1,200 to finance the school. In contrast, at the same meeting, the School Board approved borrowing $10,000 from a bank to finance the construction of a school for White students." 

The Rosenwald building was destroyed by fire weeks before the new brick 1938 school opened. Hickory Hill closed as a high school in 1948 after the opening of Carver High. It remained as a county elementary school until Richmond annexed that portion of the county in 1970.

Esparza said she'd been working on the historic designation since 1997 as part of the Hickory Hill Preservation Committee, working to ensure that any renovations of the school kept its historic elements intact.

Hickory Hill, once across from a landfill and now situated in South Richmond's urban heat island, has long been treated with disregard. The burn tower wasn't the only time the school was placed at risk. The city tried to sell the property off in 1991 before reversing course. And these designations don't guarantee the building's survival.

“The only protection we have is public awareness," Esparza said. "It does not give us any added protection, because we’re not the property owners. The city is the property owner. That’s the bottom line. All we can do is fight as taxpaying citizens.”

She's elated at the designation, and grateful to everyone who contributed, including Anderson, Pool and the Southside Joint Civic Association.  She noted that then-state Sen. Joe Morrissey wrote a letter pointing out the historic designation effort at a time when City Hall was intent on turning up the heat in Hickory Hill.  

Even before the designation was approved, Esparza and other Hickory Hill preservationists had begun raising money for a historical marker at the site, which costs $3,000.

“We’ve raised $2,300 so far," Esparza said. "People would say, 'You need to get approval first.' I said, 'No, we’re going to raise money first, because we need to show the same resilience that our ancestors showed.'”

Anderson said the landmark designations "will drive a stake in the ground that this is something that needs to be recognized and remembered in the future.”

For Hickory Hill, once spurned and nearly burned, it's a recognition well-earned.