The details still are etched in her brain.

It has been more than 75 years since Eunice Williams — then Jones — last passed through the front door of Castalia Rosenwald School as a student. Yet Thursday afternoon, as she walked through the rundown wood frame building on Lancaster Store Road, Williams could vividly recall life as a student in an all-black school in the 1920s and ’30s.

Next to the potbellied stove in each classroom was a warming bench for students who had to walk in the cold, sometimes for miles, to come to school, because there were no buses for black children, Williams said. Large windows lit the school, which had no electricity. The books and desks were hand-me-downs from white schools.

“The white children had carved their names in some of the desks we had. They had gotten rid of them and gotten them some new ones, so they handed the desks down to us. The same thing with our books. They were used books. That was all right. We took them, and we learned from them,” Williams said with a laugh.

The Castalia Rosenwald School was instrumental in educating black students in the surrounding area for more than four decades, Williams said. That’s why the Castalia Development Community Organization has been working for several years to preserve the school’s cultural and historical significance by restoring the building, she said.

For more than a decade, the group has been holding fundraisers and applying for grants to raise the money to slowly make the school habitable again, Williams said. The community group plans to use the building to house programs such as tutoring, health screenings, GED classes and a small museum to honor its history.

There were 19 Rosenwald Schools built in Nash County and 26 in Edgecombe County in the 1920s and ’30s, said C. Rudolph Knight, a local historian. Of those, there are seven still standing in Nash County and three in Edgecombe County, though one was converted into a residence and the others are abandoned. The schools were part of a rural school building program started by philanthropist Julius Rosenwald in the early 20th century.

“The arrangement was this way in order of action. The Negro community had to raise a third of the money, the local school unit had to put in one third in money or kind, such as land, and then Rosenwald would put his one third there,” Knight said.

By the time the program ended in 1932, it had provided more than $28 million to construct 4,977 new schools in 15 states, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s website. The Castalia school, which was constructed in 1922 for $3,200, was one of the first in Nash County.

The good this program did for black students nationwide needs to be remembered, said Savada Minton, 89, of Castalia. She would walk more than 2 miles every day to attend the Castalia school from first through seventh grade in the ’20s and ’30s.

“If he was nice enough to do all that, I think we should have enough common sense to want to remember it and restore it. That was a great thing when he thought about us and got that building in,” Minton said.

For many years, the school consisted of three classrooms, a hallway and a room that was supposed to be a library but never received any books, Williams said. Three teachers taught first through seventh grade, with one also handling the duties of the principal.

When Williams was in school, Sally Mae Arrington filled that role. She rang the bell to start and end school and signal recess and lunch. The teacher had a motto, “You will learn,” which was always written on her chalkboard, Williams said.

By the time Delores Harris, then Mitchell, started school at age 5 in 1946, the building had been expanded to include three new classrooms and a cafeteria in the basement. The school district didn’t provide funds for someone to serve lunch, so mothers took turns coming in to prepare it.

The history sounds bleak, but Harris said she loved her school. She cackled as she remembered how often she received spankings for talking and trying to make other students laugh.

“They made you go down in the woods and get a dogwood switch, and it better be big enough,” said Harris, 68, of Nashville.

Harris and her husband, Cleveland Harris Jr., became involved with the restoration plans about eight years ago, helping with fundraisers and anything else they could. She loves the idea of restoring the building as long as it retains the original elements that made it her school.

The Castalia school closed in the mid-1960s when the district was integrated and was sold to the community group in 1968 for $1,325, Williams said. It housed community events for years before it began to fall into disrepair. She said she hopes it will house events again.

The group still is raising funds for the restoration project. For information, call 443-9270 or send donations to P.O. Box 185, Castalia, NC 27816.