The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Hopewell School was not a Rosenwald school

Avon Park’s Hopewell School, built in 1926 as the town’s first public school for Black children, might have been one of the Rosenwald Fund schools built across Florida between 1917 and 1932.[newssun-hopewell] Its date made it plausible. It was not.

What the card file holds

Fisk University’s Franklin Library holds the Julius Rosenwald Fund’s own card file, one card per school, and has put it online. A search by state and county returns one record for Highlands County, and it is not Avon Park’s.[fisk-rfc-search]

The card reads:[fisk-sebring-card]

Sebring school — Fla. Highlands county Two acres of land Five-teacher type Built under the 1926-27 budget Application No. 12-F Total cost $12,000 — Ins. $6,000 Negroes $100 Whites 500 Public 10,100 Rosenwald 1,300

A note added in red in the margin records “$120 elem. library at this school” — the Fund’s separate library grant.[fisk-sebring-card]

Keyword searches of the whole collection for “Avon Park” and for “Hopewell” return nothing in Florida: the seventy-seven “Avon Park” hits are schools called Avon, Park Ridge, Valley Park, Fruitland Park, Winter Park, Lincoln Park and the like, in six states, and the twenty-two “Hopewell” hits are in Louisiana, Texas, South Carolina and Mississippi.[fisk-rfc-search] A comprehensive search of the broader Fisk University Rosenwald Fund Archives and Florida correspondence (Supplement 2, 1917–1946) likewise yielded negative results for any mention of Avon Park or Hopewell School.[fisk-supplement-2]

So: no Rosenwald card for Avon Park exists. Hopewell School was built with county money and whatever the Black community itself put in, and with none of the Rosenwald Fund’s.

Why this matters, and what it does not prove

The two towns built Black schools in the same year. Highlands County put its one Rosenwald application in at Sebring, the county seat, where the Fund’s $1,300 and the Black community’s own $100 helped buy a five-teacher building costing $12,000. Avon Park got nothing from the Fund.

By 1940 the two towns’ Black populations were almost identical — Avon Park 743, Sebring 736 — so the difference was not a matter of where the children were.[census-1940-t30] What made the difference was which application the county school board filed, and that decision is the thing to find. The Rosenwald Fund dealt with state and county school authorities, not with towns, so the Highlands County school board minutes for 1925 and 1926 should record both the Sebring application and whatever was done, or not done, about Avon Park.

This is a negative finding about funding, not about Hopewell School’s quality or standing. It does tell you that the money and the plan behind Hopewell were local, and it means the Rosenwald architectural plans — the Fund issued standard designs, and “five-teacher type” on the Sebring card is one of them — are not the place to look for what Hopewell’s building looked like.

References

Where this comes from

Evidence
single-source — One source. Treat as reported, not established.
Review
unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
Rights
society

Sources

  1. Julius Rosenwald Fund Collection, Franklin Library, Fisk University, Sebring School in Highlands County, Florida — Rosenwald Fund school card, budget year 1926/1927 (1927)
  2. Fisk University, Franklin Library (Forging Future Pathways Project), Julius Rosenwald Fund Collection, searched by state and county for Florida / Highlands County and by keyword for 'Avon Park' and 'Hopewell' (2026)
  3. Highlands News-Sun, Hopewell Elementary School educators encouraged Black students to excel (2026)
  4. United States Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, Volume II, Part 2, Florida, Table 30, pages 120 and 122 (1943)
  5. Fisk University, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections, Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives (Supplement 2), 1917–1946 (2026)

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