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In Allendale, an abandoned building is at the center of the community’s complex past, its troubled present and its hope of a self-determined future.
Located along the Allendale-Fairfax highway, the CV Bing High School (which has served as both a high school and primary school) has collected dust and time since schools were integrated at the end of the Jim Crow era. The building's complex, which is 22 acres, was fenced off and abandoned decades ago. For nearly ten years, community members, leaders and council members in Allendale have proposed renovating the abandoned school as a community center, a project that, like many others in Allendale, never managed to materialize.
However, recent efforts to revive the project through stakeholder partnerships and a flurry of tax credits have given the project new momentum. With Clemson University as an institutional backer, $4.5 million in federal funding secured and an excited community surrounding it, the project has both economic and local support.
Local enthusiasm for the project stems from the building’s history, as well as the community’s memory of what the building once meant. At a September 9 community meeting regarding the project, dozens of people from Allendale were in attendance, many of whom were elders who attended CV Bing as students. The community meeting was led by Rory Dowling, a North Carolina-based local economic developer who is leading the project, and has an ambitious goal of breaking ground by spring of 2025. Dowling said he hopes CV Bing can be reopened by the end of 2026.
To any passerby, the CV Bing High School is another of Allendale’s many empty buildings. But for Allendale’s elders, the building holds powerful memories of a time of both prosperity and pain.
“There’s a lot of history in that building,” said Randy Creech, a member of the Allendale Town Council who attended the school as a teenager. “I met a lot of my friends and classmates in that building. I’m thinking back now to some of the teachers and how I walked those halls. It’s bittersweet.”
In the decades prior to the building’s construction, a small campus of wooden buildings served as the education center for Black students in Allendale, according to the South Carolina Historic Properties Record. In 1950, after the wooden campus was partially destroyed by a fire, construction on what would become the CV Bing High School began.
The building was first called the Allendale Training Center, a reflection of racism in education during the Jim Crow era; at the time, the Historic Properties Record says, Black students attended training schools that focused on trades and vocational jobs, while white students attended high schools that focused on academics.
Eventually, CV Bing became the school for Black students during Jim Crow. For many elders in Allendale County, this was a complex time to grow up; in August 1965, Black and white civil rights workers were holding overnight voter registration sit-ins at the Allendale County Courthouse, at the same time that the Ku Klux Klan was active in Allendale, FBI documents from the time show.
Growing up in segregated Allendale County meant that racism was omnipresent, but the halls of CV Bing were a place of safety, discipline and growth, longtime community leader Lottie Lewis said.
“A special thing that I remember was at Christmas time, they had brown paper bags with fruit and a box of raisins,” Lewis recalled of CV Bing. “The day that you had to leave for the Christmas holiday, everybody would march through the gym, and you would get a bag of fruit to take home. The fruit smelled so fresh.”
At the September 9 meeting, the community broke into groups to discuss their connections to the building, as well as their ideas for the project. Lewis sat next to Arnetta Hulen, her former classmate at CV Bing.
“I graduated from there in 1967,” said Hulen. “I have memories of walking down the hallway, Mr. Butler making you go back to class, going to basketball games and the smell of the hot dogs.”
At the time, community members say, Allendale was a more trusting community. Doors were left unlocked at night. Gun violence was a rare occurrence. Children ran down the street playing streetball.
“I wore my first pair of Chuck Taylor’s at CV Bing,” said lifelong Allendale resident Ob Sabb through a smile; Sabb has worn white Converse his entire life, since they remind him of playing baseball with his classmates at CV Bing.
After the fall of Jim Crow and the advent of integration, white parents began sending their children to segregation academies, all-white private schools that served white families trying to avoid integration. Having become irrelevant to both the integrated public school system and to segregation academies, the CV Bing High School began collecting dust.
But for many in Allendale, CV Bing doesn’t just bring back educational memories. Surrounding CV Bing, elders recall, was a bustling small town with small businesses and motels that served interstate travelers driving down Route 301. When 301 was rerouted to the east and the 1970s farming crisis hit, Allendale’s decline began, according to Statehouse Report; not long after, the end of the Cold War downsized the Savannah River Site and Allendale’s textile industry found a new home in East Asia.
“I remember the businesses that were here years ago when I was younger,” Hulen said during the breakout sessions on September 9. “We had a lot of different businesses that were owned by whites and Blacks. People worked in the motels on 301 and they sent their children to college on those incomes. I remember Allendale being mixed, not just my color here.”
Being a rural community, Allendale County has never had the recreation of its urban counterparts; an article in the October 20, 1976 edition ofThe Allendale County Citizen titled “Recreation at Last!!” celebrates the opening of the old Fairfax Community Center with photos of children playing on a new playground.
It’s memories like these that Lewis suspects brought so many people to the September 9 meeting, as revitalization efforts in Allendale are infamous among the community for failing to materialize.
Over the past year, ideas for a community swimming pool and a state park were floated by the Allendale County Council, but were deemed too expensive. In the Town of Fairfax, the Fairfax Community and Senior Center has been under construction for five years, with the town having spent over a million on the project, as previously reported by The People-Sentinel.
Although Lewis shared the community’s excitement when the Vietnamese manufacturer Tin Thanh Group Americas announced a tire factory in Allendale that would bring over 1,000 jobs, she was also cautious. After a lifetime of community organizing in Allendale, depending on an industry on the other side of the world to revitalize the community tampered her enthusiasm; the project was expected to be online by September 2024, but has yet to break ground.
“Revitalization means nothing unless you have the involvement of the people,” said Lewis. “If people are involved in the change, they are more likely to help make it happen and maintain it.”
That’s what Lewis and many others in Allendale believe the CV Bing building can be: a chance for Allendale to rebuild itself. Lewis, council members in local government, and Rory Dowling, the developer, said they believe a CV Bing community center could bring new people to the community, as well as small businesses.
The project is expensive, Dowling said, but he believes it can be financed without burdening local taxpayers. Through Representative Lonnie Hosey, the county has already obtained $4.5 million in funding through Savannah River Site settlement funds given to South Carolina by the Department of Energy. CV Bing was also listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2022, which qualifies it for federal and state historic tax credits, Dowling said. The Abandoned Building Tax Credit, Dowling told the crowd, will finance $3-3.5 million for the project, and the project will qualify for a New Market tax credit; these credits, he said, will finance 80% of the project’s cost.
The rest of the project, Dowling said, will be financed privately. Clemson University will also be a stakeholder in the project, with Amber Lange, assistant vice president of strategic connections, attending the September 9 meeting.
But before the project begins, Dowling told the crowd his team wants community involvement at the forefront of its development.
“We want to hear from you,” Dowling said to the crowd. “We want community input. We met with the students and the energy that they had towards the project was great.”
The community came up with a number of ideas for what they would like to see in the center: An area for cooking. A baseball field. A basketball court. A space for a law enforcement presence. A space for job training. A place for child care. A space for elders.
Despite its external appearance, the structural integrity of the building is still of high quality, Dowling said. “It’s a little overgrown but the inside of it is actually in pretty good shape, so what we’re talking about is a full rehab. So new systems, new HVAC, new roof, new plumbing, new electric; it’ll look like a brand new facility by the time we’re done.”
Having witnessed so many revitalization projects fail to get off the ground, Lewis said she remains circumspect. But Lewis sees the empty CV Bing building as a metaphor for Allendale; like the building itself, Allendale's people have left, leaving behind the shell of a once-prosperous rural community. But its foundations, Lewis said, are beautiful.
“That’s where our roots began,” Lewis said, noting that her vision of the building includes a large fountain in front. “To have CV Bing revitalized so that our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren can enjoy it means so much. If my health holds up, I want to be the first one to walk through those doors. It’ll be a celebration of celebrations.”
Elijah de Castro is a Report for America corps member who writes about rural communities like Allendale and Barnwell counties for The People-Sentinel. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep Elijah writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today.
