The Shady Grove School was completed in 1925 using money from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which sought to provide better educational facilities for African Americans, and relying heavily on the labor and support of the local African American community. The one-room, one-teacher school housed grades 1-7 for more than 35 years, providing educational opportunities for several generations of Louisa’s closeknit black community. Shady Grove School is well preserved; the one-story frame building stands on its original site and retains much of its original fabric with very little alteration. While traffic on the nearby roads has increased, the school remains in a quiet, rural setting, as it was historically. According to the construction records available on Rosenwald Schools at Fisk University, Shady Grove was one of two Rosenwald schools built in the county. It is a significant example of the impact of Virginia’s “separate but equal” education policy and the resulting counterattack mounted by the Rosenwald Fund and local black citizens.