Virginia Randolph: The Teacher Who Taught the Teachers
Near Richmond, Virginia
The small brick cottage beside the road was once a home economics classroom, and it is a National Historic Landmark because of one woman whose career transformed how the rural South educated its Black children.
Virginia Estelle Randolph was born in eighteen seventy, the daughter of formerly enslaved parents. She began teaching in Goochland County around eighteen ninety and was so effective that Henrico County recruited her in eighteen ninety-two to take over the Mountain Road School, a one-room schoolhouse in bad repair. She fixed the building herself, coaxed parents to donate supplies, and within a few years had turned a failing school into a model community institution.
Her methods caught the attention of a Quaker philanthropist from Philadelphia named Anna T. Jeanes, who in nineteen oh eight established a fund specifically to hire Black supervisors who could travel among rural Southern schools and share effective teaching techniques. Virginia Randolph became the very first Jeanes Supervising Industrial Teacher in the nation, appointed in October of that year.
Her mandate was sweeping. She visited more than twenty elementary schools across Henrico County, demonstrating how to integrate sewing, carpentry, cooking, and gardening into an academic curriculum, fusing what we would now call vocational training with basic literacy and numeracy. Her first annual report became known as the Henrico Plan and was distributed to Jeanes teachers across every Southern state. The program eventually spread to Africa and beyond.
Randolph worked in Henrico County for nearly fifty-five years, retiring in nineteen forty-nine, nearly a decade before her death in nineteen fifty-eight. This cottage, built in nineteen thirty-seven to house her home economics classes, was declared a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-four. It is now the Virginia Randolph Museum, preserving the books and photographs of a woman who understood that teaching teachers multiplies every lesson.
