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| Address: | Lauderdale School complex |
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| City/County: | Lauderdale, Lauderdale County |
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The vocational building is significant historically as the only remaining structure from the Lauderdale Consolidated School, which once formed the center of the small town of Lauderdale. Vocational buildings were considered of primary importance in the curriculum of consolidated schools around the state. By the late 1930s, over 150 white schools in the state boasted a vocational agricultural program, and research and survey of historic schools in the state has found that about 300 vocational buildings were built between 1920 and 1955. Only a small number of those buildings survive, however, victims of expansion on campuses still in use and abandonment in campuses no longer operating.
Architectural Significance: The vocational building is significant architecturally as a rare example of rock-faced or stone-veneered construction in Mississippi. Popular in the 1930s, stone-veneered buildings allowed communities to use local materials, which appealed to the Depression ideal of returning to basic values. Application of stone as a veneer permitted the use of the relatively poor building stone in Mississippi, since it does not serve as the structural frame of the building, merely the exterior cladding. |
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| The old vocational building, the only remaining building at the Lauderdale School campus, is a one-story, rubble-course stone-veneer building constructed in 1937 by the National Youth Administration. Built to standardized plans promulgated by the State Department of Education, the building is topped by a hipped roof and retains its original 9/9 wood-framed double-hung sash windows and original doors (exterior and 5-panel interior). According to local historians, the rock used on the building came from sources within Lauderdale County, and the Future Farmers of America club at Lauderdale High School assisted in the construction. |
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 Lauderdale School Vocational Building: ML Significance Report July 2011 Jennifer Baughn, MDAH |
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