LEXINGTON — The years haven't been kind to Cadentown School.

        The last time children opened their books was more than half a century ago. White paint on the weather-beaten building has chipped and faded to gray.

        But while the one-room schoolhouse is showing its age, a group is working to make it Fayette County's next museum and a symbol of black education throughout the South.

        The Cadentown Neighborhood Association dreams of turning the little school into one piece of an educational center about Kentucky's rural black hamlets that have begun to disappear.

        In the early 1900s, Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck & Co., provided money to build schools for black children in the South.

        Only two Rosenwald schools are left standing in Fayette County: Cadentown and Uttingertown schools.

        Throughout the country, Rosenwald schools have become a growing subject of preservation and study. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has placed a priority on Rosenwald schools by starting the Rosenwald School Initiative, a preservation network linking and aiding groups interested in saving the schools.

        The neighborhood association has been trying to buy the school since the 1990s.

        But the property's owner, David Drury, who put it up for sale this year, has decided not to sell. Mr. Drury doesn't have any plans to sell the property or fix the school building, he said, but he declined to elaborate.

        Locally, the building has also captured the attention of the Blue Grass Trust, which placed it on its 2001 “Eleven in the 11th Hour” list of the most endangered historic properties in central Kentucky.

        “I think more projects like this are needed as we look at different areas,” said James Millard, president of the Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation.

        The neighborhood association would like to restore the school to what it looked like when it closed in the fall of 1946, said Alvin Seals, president of the Cadentown Neighborhood Association.

        Many of the nearly 5,000 Rosenwald schools built in the South have been destroyed, victims of changing times and communities.

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