Whitesville School among nine new Virginia Historical Markers

Pictured: the Accomac Debtor’s Prison Historical Marker in Accomac.

The Virginia Department of Historic Resources has announced nine new historical highway markers set to be installed across the Commonwealth, highlighting significant but often overlooked aspects of Virginia’s past. Among the new additions is a marker commemorating Whitesville Elementary School in Accomack County, a key educational institution in the Eastern Shore’s African American history.

The new markers, approved by the Virginia Board of Historic Resources during its June 12, 2025 quarterly meeting in Farmville, will cover a range of topics, including one of Virginia’s oldest continuously published newspapers, one of the nation’s longest-running African American women’s book clubs, and the impact of a 1924 state law that erased Indigenous Virginians from official records.

Whitesville Elementary School was built in 1925 to serve the children of the African American community of Whitesville, which had grown alongside the town of Parksley since the 1880s. The school was funded through a combination of community, public, and philanthropic support: $1,700 from local Black residents, $4,150 in public funds, and $900 from the Julius Rosenwald Fund. The Rosenwald Fund, launched in 1917 by Sears Roebuck president Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute, helped construct thousands of schools for Black students across the rural South. Whitesville Elementary closed in 1964, and Accomack County Public Schools were officially desegregated in 1970.

Virginia’s historical marker program, the oldest in the nation, began in 1927 with signs along U.S. Route 1. Today, more than 2,600 markers stand across the state, most maintained by the Virginia Department of Transportation.