It’s very easy to miss the Granite Schoolhouse.

Hidden behind Richmond Fire Station #24 just off of Forest Hill Avenue, this modest outbuilding doesn’t look significant at all, but this white, red-trimmed structure is the last substantive trace of a once vibrant African American community that helped build, literally, the city.

“It was a school for a long time, for almost 50 years,” says Logan Parham, field services manager for Preservation Virginia, which fosters and supports the state’s historic spaces and locations. “And then it, like a lot of these places in rural areas, became a community center, a dance hall, a juke joint.”

The schoolhouse is one of two Richmond city structures to make Preservation Virginia’s 2025 list of Most Endangered Sites In Virginia, released on May 15. The Granite joins similarly neglected structures across the state — from a dilapidated plantation in James City County to a Cotton Mill Tower in South Boston to Richmond’s abandoned Westham train station (see link) — and is one of many on the list to represent disappearing African-American history.

“Granite is a community descended from enslaved and emancipated granite miners responsible for the early granite infrastructure and streetscapes built in Richmond, Washington D.C. and New York City,” reads the Preservation Virginia synopsis recounting the reasons for the school house’s inclusion on their list. With the Granite community’s boundaries spanning from near the Willow Oaks Country Club all the way to Bon Air along Forest Hill Avenue, the listing recounts that “this original schoolhouse annex is their last remaining historical building and was used for weddings, dances, and community gatherings.”

This section of Southside is today well trafficked and teeming with fast food restaurants and strip malls. But back in the early 20th century, when the building is believed to have been constructed, it was quite rural, says Parham, who is also co-directing a documentary on the community called “Granite.” “But there was an obvious commercialization that went down, and you don’t really see any of the historic infrastructure. What’s left is hidden and that’s what the listing talks about.”

A local organization called the CommUNITY Foundation wants to buy the Granite from its owner, the City of Richmond. “We haven’t started a formal process yet,” says Olufemi Shepsu, vice president of the foundation. “But after getting this powerful designation from Preservation Virginia, we want to use the momentum to start the process as soon as possible.”

Shepsu, a descendant of the community who works as a social worker for Richmond Public Schools, says it’s imperative that the building be saved. “It represents my ancestors who worked in those granite quarries, during enslavement and after, and those granite stones were used all over the Eastern seaboard, specifically for the State Capitol, for old city hall, They also formed the foundations for the Confederate statues on Monument.” There’s a lot of history in this little building, he says, adding that the foundation wants to start a Granite museum there.

The building’s story is not dissimilar from that of other community spaces important to African Americans that appear on this year’s list, like the Ascension Church in Mecklenburg County, dating to 1879, or the Indian Knob School in Patrick County built in 1939, high in the Southwest Virginia mountains. At one time, Indian Knob was the only school for Black children in the county. Like Granite, when its purpose as a classroom was over, it became a community meeting hall and concert venue.

“It was a place where people partied, a juke joint,” says John Reynolds, the president of the Patrick County Historical Society and Museum, which has been leading the charge to repair and restore the building. “It may also have been a church.”

Indian Knob is an unusual artifact, Parham points out. “It’s truly a unicorn of a site. It’s unusual to find a historically Black schoolhouse in any county in Southwest Virginia where the Black population was historically about 3% or so.” There’s some question about whether it was a so-called Rosenwald school, one of many rural Black classrooms funded in the early 20th century by philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and Civil Rights pioneer Booker T. Washington. “It looks like a Rosenwald school in its construction,” says Reynolds, “but right now we can’t be sure.”

What is certain is how close the building is to collapsing. “It’s in much worse shape than the Granite schoolhouse,” says Parham. “It’s completely open to the air, not enclosed at all.” Reynolds says that the place would need more than $100,000 for repairs, and that the Historical Society has been applying for state grants. “We hope that the Preservation Virginia listing can get us some exposure because we’ve got work to do.”

The Goochland Recreational Center is another African American community hub on the Preservation Virginia list. Founded at the height of the Civil Rights movement by local residents, this land has been the center of Black life in Goochland for more than 60 years, not just its main structure, built in 1968, but a baseball field and a 2-acre pond, both of which are covered over now.

“The most historical part of the property is actually the pond,” says Ryan Leabough, an employee of the Goochland County Sheriff’s office who is spearheading efforts to revitalize the site. “That’s where people here learned to swim, and the Red Cross would come out and do swimming lessons, and the local doctor would do physicals there, and the churches would use that pond to baptize people. As you go around the community, you’ll hear people talk about it… it’s an important place.”

“Goochland is pretty special,” Parham echoes. “It’s a case where you have a rural community space which is kind of the center of the universe there. Outside of the church, of course, it’s the real meeting space. And this one had fallen into a bit of disrepair and neglect just due to an aging population, which a lot of places right now are experiencing. It could really be a shining light in that community again with not a ton of money being pumped into it.”

Leabough says that the center needs funds to make its bathrooms accessible to the handicapped and to bring back the pond (Goochland Parks & Rec has offered to rebuild the baseball field). “We’re also raising funds to put up a historical marker, so that people know the history of what’s happened here,” he says. “We want to bring this place back.”

Preservation Virginia’s endangered list has brought attention to more than 200 sites across Virginia since it was started in 2000. The nonprofit PV encourages individuals, groups and governments to find ways that can save historic structures and locales. The effort has largely been successful. Only 10% of the sites placed on these yearly lists have been lost.

Parham says there is a lot to protect these days — the organization’s 2025 submissions for inclusion increased thricefold from the previous year — and that future preservation funding on the federal level is in serious doubt, especially for certain kinds of history.

“A lot of these sites deal with African American history. If you’re documenting or preserving African American, Indigenous, or any non-white history, really, what you’re doing right now is an act of resistance against our government. So I think these things now are more important than ever.”