The land at 707 Promise Land Road in Charlotte, Tennessee, was bought with a soldier's pension. John Nesbitt, who had served in the 4th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery, and his brother Arch, a veteran of the 12th U.S. Colored Troops, were among the freedpeople who walked a few miles from the iron works at Cumberland Furnace after the Civil War and purchased ground of their own. On it they and their neighbors built something that had never existed in Dickson County before: a self-sustaining Black community that grew to roughly a thousand acres, with more than fifty homes, several stores, three churches, and a school.
That schoolhouse still stands, a red-brick one-room building beside the white St. John Promise Land Church — the only two original structures left of a village that once hummed with its own commerce and worship. Both are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. And beginning October 2, the church's cultural arts center will host a traveling exhibition about the larger movement that made schools like this one possible across the South.
Building a Bright Future: Black Communities and Rosenwald Schools in Tennessee was created by the Tennessee State Museum in partnership with the John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library at Fisk University. It traces the history of education for Black Tennesseans from Reconstruction, through the rise of the Rosenwald program, and into the present day. The traveling version consists of five two-sided panels, flexible enough to fit into the kinds of community spaces where this history actually happened, and it carries the stories of alumni and community members from sixteen different Rosenwald Schools in Tennessee.
One of those sixteen is close to home. "I'm particularly excited about this exhibit because it gives us an opportunity to showcase the history of the Dickson County Training School, which later became Hampton School," said Serina Gilbert, chair of the Promise Land Heritage Association board. Hampton opened around 1922 and was the only Rosenwald School in Dickson County. "Through this exhibit, visitors will have the opportunity to learn more about Hampton's important role in the education and history of African American students in Dickson County," she said. At Promise Land, the association plans to supplement the panels with additional material about Hampton and its connection to the community's own story.
The Rosenwald Schools take their name from Julius Rosenwald, the clothier who became part-owner and president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and from Booker T. Washington, the president of the Tuskegee Institute. Their partnership began in 1912, when Rosenwald earmarked an initial $25,000 for Black colleges and preparatory academies and Washington asked to direct a small portion of it toward rural elementary schools near Tuskegee. That pilot built six small schools in rural Alabama, designed and constructed under the supervision of Tuskegee's architects and staff. The program that grew out of it would, between 1912 and 1937, produce almost 5,000 schools for Black children across fifteen southern states — 354 of them in Tennessee.
The mechanism was as important as the money. Rosenwald conditioned the Fund's support on local communities raising matching funds, a requirement that forced Black families in the Jim Crow South to tax themselves for buildings their states would not provide. The need was acute: public education for Black children in the South was chronically underfunded, and in many places no school existed at all. The schools that resulted drove measurable improvement in Black educational attainment and educated the generation that would go on to lead the Civil Rights movement.
That history is documented in part because of a decision made at Fisk University in 1948. Arnaud "Arna" Wendell Bontemps — the poet, novelist, and Harlem Renaissance figure who had himself received a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1938 — acquired the Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives on behalf of the university, where he had become head librarian in 1943. The collection, spanning 1917 to 1948, documents the Fund's school building program along with its fellowships and its support for HBCUs, hospitals, and research. It is the foundation on which the Fisk library's partnership with the State Museum rests.
"TSM and Fisk wanted to build a more diverse and inclusive space for all Tennesseans to learn about and honor the history and legacy of Black education in the state," said Debbie Shaw, senior curator of archaeology at the Tennessee State Museum. "The resilience and perseverance of these Black communities as they strived for equal access to education is highlighted through their work with the Rosenwald School program. The legacy continues today as members from these same groups work toward the preservation of these schools and communities."
DeLisa M. Harris, director of library services at Fisk, called the exhibition "the first major showcase of the impact and legacy of the Julius Rosenwald Fund Rural School program in Tennessee." It grew out of an initiative that included a 4,000-square-foot temporary exhibition at the Tennessee State Museum and a two-day symposium. Museum and library teams traveled across the state, stopping in all three Grand Divisions to meet Rosenwald School alumni and descendants, whose accounts — along with those of educators — form the core of the show. The project won a 2024 Leadership in History Award of Excellence from the American Association for State and Local History and a 2024 President's Award from the Tennessee Association of Museums.
The Promise Land stop carries a particular resonance, because the community's own school predates the Rosenwald program by decades. The Promise Land School was built in the 1880s, on land John Nesbitt purchased with his pension money, and it served the community until it closed in 1957, as the Great Migration and the coming Civil Rights era drew families toward new opportunities. Serina Gilbert, a descendant of the early settlers on both sides of her family, was among the last group of students taught there. "They set it up so that they would be self-sustaining as much as possible," she told WSMV. "They built churches. They had this school."
The community's early settlers included Nathan Bowen, Joe Washington Vanleer, William Gilbert, John Grimes, Jeff Edmondson, Charles Redden, George Primm, Clark Garrett, Landin Williams, and Ed Vanleer, alongside the Nesbitt brothers. Deed records and census reports show them becoming landowners whose descendants continued to hold the land. The Promise Land Heritage Association, originally the Promise Land Community Club, was formed in 1988 to preserve and interpret that history; the school building was placed on the National Register in 2007, and a Civil War Trails marker went up in 2010 recognizing John and Arch Nesbitt's service. In 2022 the association announced a $350,000 capital and capacity building campaign, with Dickson County Mayor Bob Rial as honorary chair, aimed at expanding museum exhibits, restoring the site's buildings, and hiring an executive director.
That work of preservation is the thread the exhibition follows into the present. The Rosenwald program formally ended in the 1930s, and the schools themselves were largely abandoned or repurposed after desegregation, but the communities that built them did not disappear. Many of the same families and descendants are now the ones restoring the buildings, cataloguing the photographs, and telling the stories. The panels at Promise Land will stand a short walk from a schoolhouse those families built themselves, in a county where only one Rosenwald School ever stood.
The exhibition is on display at the St. John Cultural Arts Center at the Promise Land Historic Site from October 2 through November 2, 2026. The site, at 707 Promise Land Road in Charlotte, welcomes visitors and tours; more information is available through the Promise Land Heritage Association and the Tennessee State Museum.