Anne Chesnutt Waddell spent twenty-two years building Black education in Cumberland County, North Carolina under conditions designed to prevent it. As the supervisor of Black schools for Cumberland County from 1916 to 1936 — a position known as Jeanes Supervisor, funded by a Quaker philanthropic foundation because Jim Crow states refused to adequately fund Black education themselves — she organized, lobbied, cajoled, and constructed. She helped build seven Rosenwald schools in Cumberland County. She worked with superintendents across two decades to expand and improve the educational infrastructure available to Black children in a county where the law treated their education as a secondary concern at best. She did this as an educated Black woman in the Jim Crow South, navigating the specific constraints that placed on her authority and her movement. She did it anyway.
Anne Chesnutt was born on November 19, 1881, at 429 Gillespie Street in Fayetteville — the Chesnutt family home. She was the daughter of Andrew J. and Mary Ochiltree Chesnutt, and the sister of Charles W. Chesnutt, who would become one of the most important American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Chesnutt family was a Fayetteville institution — deeply rooted in the city’s Black community, connected to its churches, its schools, and its civic life. Charles W. Chesnutt had taught at and led the Howard School, the predecessor of Fayetteville State University, before leaving for Cleveland to pursue his literary career. Anne stayed. She graduated from the State Normal School — Fayetteville State — in 1901, did graduate work at Hampton Institute in Virginia, and returned to Cumberland County to teach and then to lead.
The Rosenwald schools she helped build were part of one of the most significant educational initiatives in American history. Between 1917 and 1932, Julius Rosenwald — the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company — partnered with Booker T. Washington and local Black communities across the South to build over 5,000 schools for Black children in states that refused to provide adequate public school facilities. The Rosenwald Fund provided seed money, but the communities themselves were required to contribute labor, land, and matching funds — a deliberate strategy to build local ownership and investment. Black families who were themselves living in poverty raised money at church socials, through personal donations, and through community campaigns to build schools for their children. Anne Chesnutt Waddell was the person in Cumberland County who made that process work — who connected the funding, organized the communities, and ensured that the schools got built and staffed.
In 1939, three years after her retirement, Cumberland County named a new school in her honor. The Anne Chesnutt School — built on Skibo Road on the west side of the Cape Fear River, serving Black students in segregated Cumberland County — opened as a high school in December 1939. It was a direct acknowledgment of what her twenty-two years of work had produced. The school desegregated over the following decades, eventually becoming Anne Chesnutt Middle School, which still operates today at 2121 Skibo Road in Fayetteville. It serves 467 students, 89 percent of whom are students of color, 99 percent of whom are economically disadvantaged. The legacy of what Anne Chesnutt Waddell built for Black children in Cumberland County is still doing its work — in the same county, under different but not unrelated conditions.
Anne Chesnutt Waddell is not widely known outside Fayetteville and Cumberland County. Her brother Charles received the recognition — the FSU library bears his name, his work is studied in university literature courses, his archive is maintained at multiple institutions. Anne’s work was the work of building infrastructure under impossible conditions, which is the kind of work that tends not to generate the documentation that survives. But the school named for her still stands. The seven Rosenwald schools she helped build educated generations of Cumberland County children who might otherwise have had nothing. That is a record. This archive is the place to put it.