In the spring of 1948, the last students and the remaining teacher, Mrs. Clara H. Brothers, left Antioch School in Mathews County for the final time. They closed the door on a neighborhood educational effort that had its origins along with Antioch Baptist Church in Susan in the years just after the Civil War. The school building that opened on the site in 1927 remains standing, and is the county’s last surviving school built with assistance from the Rosenwald Fund, which helped communities build schools for black children. Today, the Antioch Rosenwald School Committee is carrying out a thorough and accurate restoration, along the lines laid out by the original architect, Robert R. Taylor of the Tuskegee Institute. The vision, according to committee chair Janice Foster Burgess, is to recreate the light-filled space built for the education of the community’s young people. She pointed out the bank of windows across the back of the building that ushered the morning sun into the two classro...