The Orange Street School served generations of Black students before it fell into disrepair. Now, 110 years after it opened, the revitalized two-story brick building at 600 Orange Street is again ready to educate.
With a four-year, $1.45 million renovation complete, the building will now serve as a community center focused on children and teens who can use the space to explore their creativity in a new music lab, work with mentors and build skills in technology and the arts.
“For more than a century, this building has been a symbol of education. This is a space where Black students in this community have started to build their futures and pursue their dreams,” Malik Davis, City of Fayetteville council member, said to the crowd gathered for the school’s ribbon cutting on Feb. 27. “And while time took its toll on this structure, the heart of this school has never faded. Not only has this building been restored, but we have reinvented it for the next generations to come.”
The Orange Street School was built in 1915 as one of the first publicly funded schools for Black children in Fayetteville. It was the birthplace of E.E. Smith High School, the county’s historically Black public high school, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The school remained open until 1953, and the Cumberland County Board of Education used the building for offices and storage until 1983 before abandoning it, records show. Three years later, the board deeded the building to the Orange Street School Historical Association for $1. While the school already needed revitalization when the association took over, by the early 1990s, it was falling apart.
During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the Orange Street School Historical Association and The Ville’s Voice, a local Black activist group, protested outside The Market House in downtown Fayetteville to push for the building to be preserved and used as a community center. The Ville’s Voice members even cleaned up the building to make tutoring space for The Greater Life of Fayetteville to help kids struggling with online learning during the pandemic.
Programs for today’s students
The Greater Life of Fayetteville, a nonprofit serving at-risk youth, was the first community provider to call Orange Street School home during its revitalization. The group’s space on the ground floor now has a classroom with a touchscreen smartboard, a check-in area and a waiting room, all ideal for tutoring and mentoring youth. There are also new kitchen and bathroom facilities.
The stairs to the second floor retain the worn grooves from the generations of students who walked them before. Past the stairs is a museum with a historically accurate classroom based on the school’s earlier years. Two rows of small wooden desks neatly adorned with notebooks and pencils face a chalkboard.
Next to the museum is a music lab sponsored by the Sandhills Jazz Society. The lab features a vocal room, a drum room, guitars, pianos and commercial recording equipment. When not in use by students, community members can rent the space.
Two-Six Labs, a computer lab and workspace by the nonprofit the Two-Six Project, is across the hall. A large mural by local Gallery13 artist Carlos Tolentino and a wall of flatscreen TVs welcome students to the space. Desks prepped with laptops and headphones occupy half the room, while the other holds fuzzy, gray couches and lounge chairs.
The space will host master classes and activities for youth on STEM and cultural arts. Crystal Woodward, director of the Two-Six Lab, said such programming was previously lacking in Cumberland County, which has lots of youth sports activities but few options for those not interested in athletics.
Woodward is excited about the lab’s current class schedule, which ranges from entrepreneurship to songwriting to content creation. The classes will be taught by current or former Fayetteville and Cumberland County residents who’ve seen success in their given fields. The Fayetteville-Cumberland Parks and Recreation is also helping put on the activities.
“To do a master class with people that have ties right back here in Fayetteville is just so awesome because kids can really see that hey, I can go off and do that too,” Woodward told CityView.
The city, the county and the state all contributed money for the revitalization. The Two-Six Project’s partners, which include global companies like Google and Microsoft and local organizations like The Fayetteville Observer, raised another $500,000 to establish the Two-Six Labs.
“Things like this come together in a community when we work together,” Kirk deViere, chair of the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners, said at the ribbon cutting. “And there are more things that are going to happen in this community as we begin to realize that we all rise together. When we work together, great things like this can happen.”
While a North Carolina state senator from 2019 to 2023, deViere helped bring state dollars to the Orange Street School.
For Fayetteville resident Bishop McNeill, seeing the school find new life as a community space means a lot. As the son of Ernest McNeill, co-founder and later president of the Orange Street School Historical Association, he spent his entire life watching the community try to save the school. He also protested with The Ville’s Voice for the school’s new iteration.
“From when we camped out in the Market House to facilitating those meetings with Orange Street School Association and the City of Fayetteville, to now have these educational opportunities going back into the school and being able to offer these services to the community, it’s just like a 360 moment,” McNeill told CityView. “We are back to what the mission and goal was from the start.”
Still more work to be done
The Two-Six Labs completed on the day of the ribbon cutting is only the first phase of what the Two-Six Project is bringing to the Orange Street School. In a room adjacent to the completed lab will be another dedicated to e-sports, the ever-rising field of professional gaming.
“We see ourselves in these students,” Marc Somar, executive director of the Two-Six Project and a Fayetteville native, told CityView. “We’ve been afforded the opportunities at such a young age to work with some of these tech companies that we’ve been able to partner with and go on these trips and get these scholarships. Now it’s about how can we bring that here and prepare these students for something similar.”
While McNeill is excited by the offerings from the Two-Six Project, the Sandhills Jazz Society and other community partners, he said there is still more the Orange Street School can offer the community.
“You have all the services that can be offered inside the building, and there’s been a lot of renovation done to do that, but it’s also a big, several-acre lot with a lot of capabilities,” McNeill said.
The school sits on a 1.2-acre lot that stretches across Orange Street’s 500 block — land that McNeill would like to see used for splash pads and agricultural projects, which could allow the community to be self-sustaining. Woodward also wants an outdoor classroom space for students of the Two-Six Labs to use in the spring and summer.
McNeill would also like to see the work his father put into preserving the school memorialized. He said his father dedicated his final 30 years to restoring the Orange Street School, standing before the Fayetteville City Council petitioning for funding and putting in his own money and labor to repair the building.
His father’s work was acknowledged at the ribbon cutting by Theolive Washington, current head of the Orange Street School Historical Association. Without McNeill’s father bringing together the association, Washington said the school would have been nothing more than a home for pigeons.
“He passed away in 2014 on the steps of the Orange Street School while opening up for a group to come in,” McNeill said. “To see where we are 11 years later, knowing that his sacrifice has been worth it, that means a lot to me and should be mentioned and recognized.”

(Board of Commissioners Chairman Kirk deViere, Vice Chairwoman Veronica Jones, and County leadership team members were honored to join City of Fayetteville, NC Government elected officials and community leaders for the Orange Street School ribbon cutting on Thursday, Feb. 27. Photo Courtesy of Cumberland County NC Government's Facebook page)