Tides of Time: Historic Watha School Preserves a Legacy of Sacrifice and Community

WILLARD, NC (WWAY) — Walking back into a school you haven’t seen since you were five years old can bring back memories you thought you’d forgotten.

For me, stepping inside the old Watha School in Pender County was a journey back to kindergarten in the mid-1970s — just a few years after the school was integrated.

The building looks different today. It has fresh paint and new flooring. But some things remain remarkably familiar.

The mid-century light fixtures still hang from the classroom ceilings. And in the front office, a mural featuring Geppetto, Jiminy Cricket and Pinocchio is still there.

Behind the brick school is a small wooden building.

As a kindergartener, that’s where I ate lunch.

Back then, I had no idea the little schoolhouse had a history that stretched back more than half a century.

“When I get people to come here and visit this building, I try to take them back to 1921,” said Clifton West, president of the Willard Outreach Community Center.

That’s when the building served as a schoolhouse for Black children in Watha. Building and maintaining the school often required significant sacrifice from the community it served.

West says families gave what little they had to support the school.

“My dad used to tell me stories about this building, how they used to work out in the fields as a sharecropper and the little money they made, they gave half of it to the school.”

Even though they didn’t have much, they understood what an education could mean for their children.

Douglas Johnson, founder of the Willard Outreach Community Center, says his grandfather also helped raise money for Watha School.

“My grandfather, he sold sugarcane, he sold chickens, and they had different bake sales and fundraisers to allow them to bring some kind of resources together to educate their children.”

In the 1950s, the building was moved from Watha and given a new purpose — becoming the cafeteria for Willard Elementary School which opened in 1954 as an “equalization school.”

For generations of children, the small wooden building became a familiar part of their school experience.

And for some, it provided something as basic — and as important — as a meal.

“Somehow the cafeteria staff would make sure that everybody had an opportunity to eat,” Johnson said.

For children whose families couldn’t afford a cafeteria lunch, there was another option.

“They had this big pot of oatmeal that they would roll around to the different classrooms, and we would enjoy that very comfort food that the cafeteria lady would bring.”

Those memories are just one part of a much larger story — one that spans segregation, integration and generations of children who learned and grew here.

“When we think about people that have gone on before us and made these places possible, we’re standing on their shoulders,” Johnson said. “We’re enjoying the benefit of their labor.”

Over the years, the building fell into disrepair.

But the community wasn’t willing to let it disappear.

Volunteers stepped in to help restore the school, including members of the Old Skool Car Club.

Today, the restored Watha School is part of the Willard Outreach Community Center. It is used for ESL classes, meetings and community events.

For those working to preserve it, the building represents the determination of a Black community that supported education and invested in its children at a time when public resources were often inadequate.

Char McClain, a Willard Outreach Community Center volunteer, says the connection runs deep for people who grew up here.

“When this school was no longer being used and the elementary school shut down, it’s the community that came in and said absolutely no,” McClain said. “If you spend any time talking with members of this community who attended elementary school in this building or attended the school that you did and ate lunch here, it is not something they will see torn down.”

Now, another generation is working to make sure the story continues.

The Willard Outreach Community Center is seeking to have the Watha School nominated for the National Register of Historic Places.

The organization says it needs between $2,000 and $5,000 to hire a professional architectural historian to complete the nomination. A GoFundMe has been established to help raise the money needed for the consultant and support the preservation effort.

West says preserving the building isn’t just about saving an old schoolhouse. It’s about preserving the stories that happened inside.

“It’s a lot of history in here,” he said. “I want them to feel that when they walk in the building and also our pride to have this, here, in Willard.”

For me, returning to the Watha School brought back memories of being five years old — memories of a classroom, a lunchroom and a place that was simply part of childhood.

But standing there decades later, I learned there was so much more to this building than I ever understood as a child.

It is a story of segregation.

Of sacrifice.

Of perseverance.

And of generations of people who believed their children deserved better — and were willing to give what they could to make that possible.

The Watha School isn’t simply a piece of the past.

It is a reminder of what a community can accomplish when it refuses to let its history — or its hopes for the future — disappear.