Marley Neck School is a modest clapboard building more than 75 years old, a former schoolhouse for black children that now has peeling paint and holes that let daylight through the siding.
For decades when it was open, Marley Neck had no electricity, depending on large windows to let in sunlight. Heat was provided by two large cast-iron stoves that burned wood or coal during the day, and had to be banked overnight. Water came from a well in front, and in back were separate privies for girls and boys.
But some who attended the Glen Burnie school during the era of segregation have nothing but fond memories - and now are fighting to preserve it.
A bill introduced by Anne Arundel County Del. Joan Cadden seeks a $331,000 bond to restore Marley Neck School, one of 24 in the county built with assistance from the Rosenwald Fund, set up in 1911 by Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Co. from 1909 to 1924.
Rosenwald was inspired by Chicago rabbi Emil Hirsch, who advocated teaching self-help along with charity. In 1913 Rosenwald began working with civil rights leader Booker T. Washington, who shared his belief in self-reliance. Grants from Rosenwald were contingent on substantial contributions from local sources.
The push to restore Marley Neck came from Helen Johnson, 66, of Glen Burnie, who attended school at Freetown, and from other members of the Friends of Marley Neck School.
"We were a very close community," said Rosalie Gaither, who attended the school during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
"Teachers pushed all of us to do better," said Yvonne Henry, who was in Gaither's class.
Samuel Gaither, 89, Henry's father (and a distant relative of Rosalie Gaither), and his cousin, Rachel Hall Brown, 91, were students at a previous school on the Marley Neck site that burned down in 1921. Classes had to be held in the neighboring Hall United Methodist Church until a new school could be built. Gaither's father, a truck farmer, stretched his earnings to contribute.
In 1928, when he was in seventh grade, Gaither was taught in the then-new Rosenwald school by Rachel Hall Brown's husband, Philip Brown.
"I'd never been in a school that size before," said Philip Brown, 95, who grew up in Annapolis and now lives in Arundel-on-the-Bay with his wife.
During the late 1940s, when Henry and Rosalie Gaither were attending Marley Neck, it had up to 70 students in two rooms.
