Holly Spring School

The Holly Spring School is located in southern Greenville County in a community called Possum Kingdom. The exact construction date of the school in not documented but oral history places it in the 1870's. The school was created for the children of former slaves in the area and there is a distinct possibility that the building is actually a former double pen slave cabin that was modified into a school based on its physical characteristics and construction techniques. In 1891, the preexisting school was formerly sold to a board of trustees made up of local community leaders. It then continued to serve as a school for African American students throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It was eventually incorporated into the Greenville County School System and was finally closed upon integration of the school district. Since that time the building has sat vacant on the grounds of the Holly Spring Baptist Church, an African American Baptist Church established adjacent to the school in the early twentieth century. The school has been owned and maintained by the church for the last 60 years as donations from the community and volunteers would allow. As with many small rural churches the congregation has aged and shrunk considerably resulting deferred maintenance that could have eventually resulted in the buildings demise.

In the spring of 2018 Reverend Massey, the Pastor of Holly Spring Baptist Church, approached the Greenville County Historic Preservation Commission about the state of the school and requested assistance in finding a way to save the building. The GCHPS under the leadership of then Chairwoman Anne Peden, in conjunction with Reverend Massey, reached out to Kyle Campbell with Preservation South, a local preservation consulting firm, to develop a pro bono plan for addressing the building's needs. With no budget to speak of the church organized a gospel singing in the community to raise funds and the Fork Shoals Historical Society provided a thousand dollars in matching grant funds to get things moving. Ultimately a total of four thousand dollars were raised locally from many small donors giving whatever they could.

This project is a prime example of what can happen when a community comes together to save a historic resource, and it wouldn't have happened without the team that was created. Now Holly Spring School will survive well into the future and can be interpreted as a rare example of an early African American school building in our state.