New paint, new air conditioning, new board and new hours are coming to the Elmore County Black History Museum.
The Elmore County Black History Museum is housed in the old Elmore County Training School. While currently closed for renovations, a new museum board hopes it will reopen soon.
“I am pleased to announce new leadership and board of directors of the Elmore County Black History Museum and Teachers Home,” Wetumpka councilmember Cheryl Tucker said. “This seven-member board was appointed by me to manage and operate the Elmore County Black History Museum.”
Tucker said the diverse board will bring new ideas to the museum and its facilities in an effort to educate visitors on African American history and life in Elmore County.
Winfred Wise attended Elmore County Training School in first and second grades and is the board’s president. The other six board members, Stephanie Stepney, Pamela Williams, Idell Gill, Michael Waters, Elaine Lewis and Yvonne Saxon, have connections to Elmore County and its rich Black heritage. Like the other six board members, Wise wants the mission of the old school to remain the same — education.
“The primary goal of the new board of directors will be to open the museum on a regular basis and add new displays,” Wise said. “Billie Rawls will serve as the curator and Pat Williams will serve as the assistant curator.”
The City of Wetumpka owns the building. With help from the city and grants some renovations are currently underway to create a better experience for guests.
Tucker is hopeful the new board will get more people to see what the museum has to offer especially with Wetumpka’s popularity.
“We want a museum that reflects our community and also Elmore County,” Tucker said. “We want it to be open. You shouldn’t have too call the city’s administration building or the chamber of commerce just to get a tour. If there are set days and times for being open, it would be better. When HGTV hit it blew up, but it still wasn’t open.”
Rawls was one of 156 seventh graders at the school in 1962 and has been involved with the museum for more than 20 years. Rawls has served as the curator for the museum and some of the displays feature items from her collection.
“I went to school here, my mother and father went to school here,” Rawls said. “This has always been a pet peeve of mine.
“At first when I came here, I thought I was the junk collector. They said, ‘You are not the junk collector, you are the curator.’”
Now Rawls has changed her mind about her ‘junk.’ and acknowledges the Elmore County Black History Museum is more than a museum.
“It is an honor to be the curator,” Rawls said. “This is my home and it feels good to come to this place and work and preserve history for the world as well as Elmore County. That is what we do is preserve history for our own. We do research from here too.”
Many of the items in the museum’s displays are similar to those of many museum’s showing daily life going back 100s of years. But in the case of the Elmore County Black History Museum, the display reflects the life of African Americans in Elmore County.
The museum has had students from local schools come take a tour.
“Children are fascinated when they come and see some of the things,” Rawls said. “They didn’t know what a chamber pot was. They don't know what a glass drink bottle is. They don’t know what a rubboard, washpot or ironing board are. The artifacts here that we introduce to them were used back in the day.”
Students and visitors can even visit with the Thread My Needle group as they quilted.
“They could see them make quilts and they tell them how it’s made,” Rawls said. “We have had several that have gone home and made quilts based on what they learned here. We give them a sample of material to go home and put together. Out of that they have created their own quilt.”
Currently the quilters are not meeting at the museum due to the renovations.
Williams said the museum helps fill a void in history and the lessons some want to wash over.
“There was a time in our nation’s history where enslaved people couldn’t learn,” Williams said. “It is ironic and why this place is important is it serves as a way to educate because there are so many that don’t know who need to learn about enslaved people.”
But the museum contains so much more than just a few displays of everyday life.
Rawls and volunteers have put together a list of all the elected Black officials who serve or have served Elmore County.
“We have a wall of honor that is dedicated to our military — deceased, who have served and still serve,” Rawls said. “We have our obituary sections. We have over 1,000 obituaries who have come and gone. The reason is it is so unique, when people leave here and go to the services wherever it is, the family sends back the obituary to us to be placed in our section. It is a form of history.”
Rawls said there are 10 notebooks filled with enough obituaries to fill 10 more.
“The oldest dates back to the 1800s,” Rawls said. “It is a real newspaper clipping.”
Rawls said the museum is involved in research projects with the University of Alabama.
The school dates back decades and served as more than just an educational center for the Black community in Wetumpka. The home economic program washed and folded laundry for the community to help fundraise and to provide the service. It also housed a cannery to help teach students food preservation but also to preserve food for the community.
Even the buildings themselves were the products of lab projects with Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee Institute. Bricks made by Tuskegee students so they could learn were used to construct the buildings and the same goes for the milling of wood used in flooring, walls and beams.
Today only three buildings remain of the old Elmore County Training School — the administration building that houses the museum, the teachers’ home where freshly graduated teachers would live while teaching at the school and the long building that once housed classrooms.
Other parts of the school site are still visible. The concession stand for the new football complex is where the old elementary school once was.
Rawls and Wise left the school in 1962 as they were moved to the new W.B. Doby High School, currently Wetumpka Elementary School.
“The board of education had a choice — either let us go to the all white Wetumpka school,” Wise said. “They bought that land from Alabama Power and built us a new school.”
In 1969 Fred Gray would amend his desegregation lawsuit to include Elmore County and finally the students of Doby would attend Wetumpka schools. But Wise and others wanted to recognize the efforts of W.B. Doby.
“We had a historical marker put out there with W.B. Doby High School put on it,” Wise said. “We also had the activity center named after Mr. Doby. He was the first principal of the Elmore County Training School.”
Saxon, Wise and others not only want to remember Doby and his efforts to educate the Black community but the efforts of many more.
“We want to continue to enhance the museum with different ideas and ways to assist them in making it more functional in many different ways,” Saxon said.
Wise said the board has ideas for future exhibits in the museum. New displays are possible for Gray, Dr. Martin Luther King and President Barack Obama.
Wise and the board hope to have the museum open soon.
“There is a rich Elmore County Black History in here,” Wise said. “We want to open the museum up to let people see what we have.”
