his Old School House. Ask almost any school child at Elliot Primary in Devonshire about the history of their school and they will answer smartly, ?The Old Elliot School was started by 12 Black men after emancipation.?

?They all learn about it during black history month,? said Elliot Primary deputy principal Valerie Williams, whose mother, Millicent Brown, attended Elliot as a child. ?Every year we pull articles out about the old school and show them to the students.?

After the large playing field at the current Elliot Primary, flushing toilets and 280-strong student body, the tiny structure on Jubilee Road with an outhouse, on the edge of a cow pasture must be quite a shock to the students. It is also a reminder of how hard many of their forefathers worked to ensure them an education. The Old Elliot School Trust is a registered charity. Plans to turn it into a museum stalled a few years ago for lack of funds, but things are looking up for the building. Old Elliot School Trust treasurer Leon Simmons told the that next week the project may finally be moving ahead.

?We started fundraising virtually from the first day the trust was started,? said Mr. Simmons who has been a trustee of the building for 13 years. ?We raised money through various fundraising avenues. We got to the point where we were ready to go ahead and to our surprise we had to replace the whole roof.

?It was very unsafe for anyone to even occupy the building. People couldn?t see what was happening in the roof because there was a ceiling. When they took all of that down they saw that the lathes that hold the Bermuda slate were all rotten.

?Repairing the roof set us back quite a bit. In fact, it was in excess of $30,000 to replace. That was a third of our budget that was shot right there. We continued on and we got to a point where we were running out of funds.?

Construction had to be stopped. To try to raise some revenue the building, which currently has no doors or windows, is being rented out and the trust recently obtained an interest free loan to finish everything off.

?We haven?t received the funding from the loan as yet,? said Mr. Simmons. ?It took awhile because we had to get quotations for the additional work that had to be done to finish off the building.

?For each area, plumbing, electrical, the mill work for the windows and doors, all of those had to have quotations from several sources. At this point in time we have had a short fall. It is approximately $29,000. With the interest free loan and other things we have had in place, we should be able to do this work starting in the very near future. I should know by March 1 where we are going to go with the funding. It is all in the pipeline.?

In today?s world, the sum needed doesn?t sound like a great deal of money, but it?s a staggering sum compared to the land?s original cost: around eleven shillings.

The school was built in 1848, 14 years after emancipation by a group of black artisans and farmers, many of whom could not write their own names.

Cyril Packwood, author of ?Chained on the Rock?, wrote: ?During slavery, most masters discouraged general education for slaves. They were afraid educated Blacks would no longer be subservient, would think themselves equal to whites, would be discontented, rebellious, insubordinate and no longer in their place.?

Gov. Charles Elliot was not one of these whites. He was interested in the welfare of the freed slaves, and he smoothed the way for the land to be purchased. The school was named after him, and a notice appeared in the April 10, 1848 thanking Gov. Elliot for his assistance with the school.

The notice read, in part, ?Being without education themselves [the builders of the school, they feel the greatest satisfaction in the reflection that its advantages are likely to be secured, with much local convenience to their children ? who may now, by the divine blessing, be preserved from ignorance and its attendant evils, and trained to a proper estimation of industry, and a knowledge and practice of religion.?

Over time, the school outgrew the building and moved to a larger structure also on Jubilee Road and then much later to the site on Hermitage Road. However, over the years the old school has been used on-and-off to catch class overflow, and even as a church.

Some of its former teachers and alumni are still alive. Peggy Burns, who attended classes in the old school house in the 1950s, would like to bring together Elliot School alumni and interested parties to talk about the future of the building.

Mrs. Burns grew up on Jubilee Road just down the road from the school house. At least four generations of her family including her own children and grandchildren have attended Elliot in its various incarnations.

In 1990, her uncle, the late Reginald Ming, originally proposed that the building and the land become a trust. Making the place into a museum was his passion, and now his niece hopes to help carry on his work.

?I started at Elliot at the age of five, but I was at the second Elliot school building,? Mrs. Burns said. ?Later on I went to the old Elliot. I have all my report cards. The teacher use to make comments that I was very talkative. I am trying to figure out exactly what I would have been talking about so much.?

Mrs. Burns hopes that one day items like her report card could be put into the museum. Mr. Simmons has similar plans. When the project is completed the old Elliot will look like a period school house, and hopefully attract visitors.

Items for it may be purchased from abroad, or perhaps reconstructed in Bermuda. Mr. Simmons is very eager to hear from anyone who has old photographs or other memorabilia of the school.

?I do have happy memories of the school,? said Mrs. Burns. ?My family live on Jubilee Road and my father, Earl Ming, went to the school with his siblings.

?The school was built in 1848, and I was born a hundred years later. The school was very close to home. My father was a dairy farmer. I lived on the farm, and everything was in walking distance. My grandmother lived a stone throw away from the school house. She had a little concession. I use to visit my grandparents? home frequently. Though money was scare in that day, my grandfather was always generous in producing maybe a thruppence, or a six pence and that bought us candy and bubble gum.?

She said, oddly enough, she never knew that her grandfather was a farmer like her father until recently. ?The unusual thing about that era was that people were very discrete,? she said. ?Children were usually seen and not heard. Very often you were not allowed in adult gatherings. If you wanted to listen in on what the adults were talking about you had to be very quiet. As soon as they recognised your presence they would reprimand you and send you off.?

She felt this policy of giving children as little information as possible, put her generation at a disadvantage.

?Today?s children have information coming from all sources, the media, everybody,? she said. ?Us, we had to pretty much find our own way. Very often our report cards would reflect that. ?So and so spends too much time daydreaming?. But it is out of daydreaming that ideas are born and inventions are thought of. I use to sit on the side of the room next to the roadway and gaze out of the window.?

She said teachers at the school were quite firm. Every time a teacher came into the room the children had to stand. If the teacher went out of the room and re-entered the classroom within a matter of minutes or even seconds the children had to stand again.

?I always thought, ?this makes no sense, we just said good morning?,? said Mrs. Burns. ?But one thing that has come out of that conditioning is it engendered respect for others.?

She said life at the school wasn?t all a bed of roses. Children were ?under heavy manners?. ?When I reflect on it now, it was oppressive,? she said. ?If you had dreams, you didn?t share them with anyone. Everyone was walking around without a mouth. There was so little communication and little interaction. When you think of what is happening today, people have more intimate relationships socially with children and adults. There is more sharing and fellowshipping.?

She blames it partly on the political climate of the day. Some parents were afraid to encourage their children to dream for fear they would get their child?s hopes up, particularly if they were female.

?We grew up in a segregated era,? said Mrs. Burns. ?Girls were very protected, because their parents knew what the deal was. They had to create this protective mechanism that would shield their children from the pains that they themselves had experienced. As a child I wasn?t able to process all of that because I didn?t have the information.?

Mr. Simmons said he welcomed Mrs. Burns? interest, particularly since many Old Elliott School committee members and trustees had passed away or were elderly.