Quartz Countertops in St. George, SC

ST. GEORGE, S.C. (WCSC) - The Rosenwald School in St. George, which once served thousands of Black children during the 20th century, has since been restored as a multi-use space and is now expanding beyond the school walls to continue its mission of education.

The , once named the St. George Colored School, received $428K in state funds to improve the space, and with that money, they have added a dining car to tell the story of the school’s founders and acquired an adjacent property known as Mabel’s Grill. Their goal with expanding the school and turning it into a campus is to tell the entire story about the community of St. George, both inside and outside of the school.

The school opened in 1925 and helped educate Black students in a segregated South. After closing in 1954, the building began to deteriorate and was abandoned. It was only after a group of alumni decided to save the school that its history was restored. The building currently includes an auditorium, a children’s museum, classrooms with original student desks, pot-belly stoves and floors.

But with the recent grant money and other donations, St. George Rosenwald School Chairman Ralph James says they can get creative and further their mission. He was one of the last students to attend the school.

“It is an opportunity to fulfill a mission and a vision that I always had of contributing to the community,” James says. “It gives it a little livelihood and also the variety offers an opportunity for other people not only to share in the experience, but to also have a valuable experience themselves as they come and connect to the school building project.”

He says the work from the board and the network of alumni help maintain the story they want to pass on to the next generation.

Edith Williams-Oldham is an alumnus of the school and currently serves on the board as the historian. She says she still remembers the thriving community that raised her.

“It was a loving and caring community,” Williams-Oldham says. “People cared for each other, they looked out for each other, they supported each other, and it was just a good place to grow up, and I enjoyed it so much. I learned so much from this school.”

As Williams-Oldham shared numerous stories about the local businesses surrounding the school, she emphasized that the school wouldn’t have succeeded without the community’s support. Many of the names of local shops and restaurants that were in the area can now be found on a plaque outside the school.

“This is not going to be just the Rosenwald School, it’s going to be the Rosenwald campus from one end of town to the other,” Williams-Oldham says.

Shirley Chapman is another alumnus of the school and is glad to see the school growing into a campus so that the story isn’t forgotten.

“Who can tell our story better than us?” Chapman asks. “We can read about it, but we can tell our own story better because we know it. We’ve lived through it. We know the struggles and the hardships and the pain and how we’ve overcome them. And we’ve come too far now to go back.”

The grant money has also helped with amenity improvements like adding sidewalks, obtaining a shuttle cart for tourists and renovating the restrooms on site.

“We are very much dependent now on the generosity of our supporters helping us and continuing with where we are going,” James says.

James says they hope to finish the dining car installation by the end of this year. The school plans on celebrating its 100th anniversary next year.

“As we look back, although some of our means were meager, we were still able to succeed against the odds that were there,” James says. “And this school, this project is a great indication to our children today and to those of us who shared in the experience that you can succeed, you can make it, you can become a valuable member of society.”

A new volume represents a very timely reprint of St. George Mivart’s provocatively titled On the Genesis of Species (New York: Appleton, 1871). The general editor of the Inkwell Press, James Barham, announces in his introduction that further forgotten classics in the same genre will presently follow. The text presents the second edition (slightly revised to take account of Darwin’s Descent of Man published earlier in the same year).

Mivart (1827-1900) throughout his life remained something of a thorn in Darwin’s side, joining sides with Harvard professor Asa Gray, geologist Sir Charles Lyell, Alfred Russel Wallace, and many others who argued that it was absurd to accord mere chance such an overwhelming role in the evolutionary process. Mivart was convinced that, just as there is a principle internal to an organism which determines its embryological development, so must there be an internal principle determining the species as a whole. He echoed the originally Aristotelian idea of immanent teleology in opposition to the Epicurean and Lucretian philosophies which put everything down to the random jostling of atoms producing accidental new shapes and forms (hence the term “atomism” given to that ancient way of thinking that the modern world has taken to with such uncritical alacrity).

A Philosophical Counterblast

Mivart’s Genesis of Species was in its origin conceived as a philosophical counterblast to Darwin’s Origin of Species and in its pages we find many early critiques of Darwin’s logic. Mivart includes a whole chapter (pp. 35-75) on the inability of natural selection to account for incipient structures. Like Charles Lyell, leading paleontologist Richard Owen, and the scientifically educated Duke of Argyll, he felt that so-called natural selection could not possibly be the vera causa of anything whatsoever since it was an inert, purely passive phenomenon incapable of producing novelty.

Mivart’s objection has not gone away (although it is often studiously ignored). The same goes for his pointing to the lack of fossil evidence to back up Darwin’s gradualist notions of animal development over the eons. Anticipating modern notions of saltations (sudden and unheralded new developments in animal physiology) associated with the name of the late Stephen Jay Gould, Mivart felt that this (problematical as it is) was a more likely developmental route for animal/human development than the one proposed by Darwin.

The Unforgiven

Darwin’s inner circle could never forgive Mivart for being a practicing Roman Catholic and there is certainly much truth in Mivart’s claim that he was shunned by the Darwin party out of what he termed odium antitheologicum (prejudice against theists). But Mivart was no shrinking violet in his repeated attacks on “the inconsistencies and ambiguities” in Darwinian theory, and it has even been mooted that Darwin ultimately withdrew from the evolutionary fray he himself had caused by retreating in older age to study the entirely “safe” subject of barnacles.

Those interested in Mivart’s life might consult the older volume by Jacob Gruber, A Conscience in Conflict: The Life of St. George Mivart (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), and David L. Hull’s Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). Hull’s important work contains not only generous excerpts from Mivart’s writings (pp. 351-384) but by many other early critics including that critic whom Darwin feared most, Fleeming Jenkin (pp. 302-50), together with the first man to poke holes in Darwin’s argument when he became privy to a pre-publication document outlining the theory later developed in the Origin of Species, namely Professor Samuel Haughton (pp. 216-228).

Mivart in Context

By consulting these additional works the reader will be in a better position to contextualize Mivart within the intellectual milieu of the Victorian era. Mivart was by no means an outlier since a veritable cohort of sympathizers rose up in the 1860s and 1870s to create a very audible chorus of dissent, and for much the same reasons as that dissent continues unabated to the present day. For Darwin then as now trades on the reiteration of what the ancient Romans called the ipse dixit (“he himself said it” — implication: it MUST be right). I’ll give the last word to Mivart on this issue (cited from Hull’s Darwin and His Critics, p. 359):

Darwin, starting at first with an avowed hypothesis, constantly asserts it as an undoubted fact, and claims for it, somewhat in the spirit of a theologian, that it should be received as an article of faith.

I warmly recommend this book to all those who value evidence-based thinking and wish to look beyond the ideological assertions which are all too often a substitute for properly reasoned argument.

UPDATE 5:40 P.M. Northbound lanes on I-95 near St. George have reopened.

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ST. GEORGE, S.C. (WCBD) — Drivers are being asked to avoid a stretch of Interstate 95 in Dorchester County as crews respond to a chemical spill.

Authorities said two tractor-trailers were involved in a collision near exit 77 in St. George around noon, causing a hydrogen peroxide leak.

The interstate was closed in both directions for several hours, but northbound traffic has since reopened.

“We’re thankful to get those back open,” said Cpl. Nick Pye with the South Carolina Highway Patrol. “That’s going to reduce a lot of the tension on us highways and secondary roads along the detour.”

Southbound traffic is currently being rerouted, and lanes are expected to remain closed for some time. Those traveling southbound should exit at the mile marker 82 exit ramp, take US 178 to US 15 south to Highway 61, then enter I-95 at exit 68.

“We’re hoping for a quick turnaround on the southbound lanes as well, but it could be a couple of hours before those are back open,” Pye added.

First responders remain on the scene. Significant traffic delays are expected to continue on I-95, as well as on Highways 15 and 79.

A nearby tractor supply store and Arby’s were briefly evacuated, but no injuries have been reported.

This story is developing.

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