WINCHESTER — This summer’s oppressive heat and humidity postponed, then cancelled, the annual Juneteenth celebration that Fremont Street Nursery originally planned for June 21.
But the nursery’s executive director, Freda Roberson, wasn’t about to cancel the kudos she planned to bestow on two of the organization’s alumni.
On Friday, she invited The Winchester Star to join her and Fremont Street Nursery board secretary Candace Davenport for a free-wheeling trip down memory lane with Charles and Sharon Wms. Harris of Winchester, a married couple of 55 years who were preschoolers when they first met at the nonprofit nursery in the early 1950s.
“Not only are they alumni, but they continue to donate and be a part of Fremont’s family,” Freda said. “We wanted to show our appreciation to them this year. … They never forgot where they came from.”
Fremont Street Nursery opened in 1943 as the Negro Day Nursery. The facility was located in a house on East Pall Mall Street and served the city’s Black children, many of whom had mothers who had to find jobs and earn a living while their husbands fought in World War II.
Freda said many Black women during WWII earned money by caring for white children. A group of white women noticed this and began wondering who was caring for the kids of the Black mothers who were babysitting the whites. These women worked together to create the Negro Day Nursery.
“And here we are,” Freda said on Friday.
Charles and Sharon were students at the nursery when it opened. They graduated in 1950, five years before the facility moved to its current location at 533 Fremont St. in Winchester and became the Fremont Street Nursery.
“There were big rocks, I mean boulders, in the yard,” Charles said. “There wasn’t any grass; it was all gravel. There was one set of swings, and later on they put in a couple of hobby horses and a see-saw.”
Charles and Freda shared photos on Friday of the original nursery, some of which showed its students dressed up to put on plays.
“I was the Pie Man in ‘Simple Simon,’” Charles said, pointing to himself in one of the pictures. “All those costumes were handmade by the Mother’s Club [comprised of the nursery children’s mothers].”
“That’s when you had dedicated moms that did everything from scratch,” Freda added. “They just don’t make them like they used to.”
Sharon remembered the children at the nursery being given a substance that was said to be butter but most likely was not.
“It came in a plastic bag and there was a little red dot in the center,” she said of the mysterious goo. “You worked it and the butter became yellow. I couldn’t figure out how other butter came out yellow without one of these little pills in it.”
Nursery students would occasionally be treated to a small, glass bottle of chocolate milk. Sharon and Charles said that tasted much better than the tablespoon of cod liver oil students were required to swallow every morning as a nutritional supplement. Even though the Harrises are now in their 80s, the memory of that cod liver oil still makes them wince.
Sharon said another thing that was less than wonderful at the Negro Day Nursery was the cabbage they cooked for lunches.
“They cooked cabbage. All. Day. Long,” she said. “The smell was terrible. … I never left there hungry unless they were serving cabbage.”
Other than the cabbage and cod liver oil, Sharon and Charles said they had no complaints about the daycare center. At a time when they weren’t allowed to stand at a city bus stop with whites, sit in the Capitol Theater anywhere other than the upper balcony or eat a banana split at the People’s Drug Store counter — “That was normal,” Sharon said — they always felt loved and important at the nursery.
The Harrises were never students at the Fremont Street location, but Charles worked there years later as its janitor.
“Do they still take naps?” Charles asked Freda about her current students.
“They do, but we call it ‘quiet time’ because we can’t force children to go to sleep,” Freda replied.
Candace never attended the nursery but was a frequent visitor to its playground on Fremont Street. That’s because she lived directly across the street.
“When it was closed, we’d climb the fence,” Candace said with a sly grin, noting that one of her brothers still has a scar on his arm that he received when became stuck at the top of the chain-link fence. “That merry-go-round, I tell you, we could get it going fast.”
Today, the Fremont Street Nursery serves children of all races and cultures ranging in age from 6 weeks to 12 years. Its primary mission is to care for kids from low-income or single-parent families, so the nonprofit offers sliding-scale tuition rates based on a family’s ability to pay. Freda said 43 of her more than 80 current students come from situations where even the discounted tuition is too much to afford, so they are attending for free thanks to scholarships funded by donations from Winchester residents and businesses.
“I would love to have the entire daycare come for free on scholarship because it’s a [financial] burden for some of our parents,” Freda said. “We have the lowest tuition in Winchester, but it’s still close to a [monthly] mortgage payment.”
Based on growing demand for the nursery’s services, Freda said they will soon be adding another classroom to the building that has already been expanded and renovated several times since its opening 71 years ago.
“Generations keep coming through here,” Freda said. “Everybody’s a part of this village. … Ninety percent of our staff has been here for 10 years or longer. Over half have been here for 20 years.”
It’s important for today’s children to understand the struggles Blacks endured while fighting for equal footing with whites, Freda said, so she has been holding Juneteenth celebrations ever since the event became America’s 12th federal holiday on June 17, 2021.
Juneteenth dates back to June 19, 1865, when approximately 250,000 enslaved African Americans in Texas were informed that President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery in the United States had gone into effect nearly two-and-a-half years earlier. Slaves in Texas were the last people in the country to hear the news because of the time it took for U.S. soldiers to reach the state and enforce Reconstruction and emancipation policies following the end of the Civil War on April 9, 1865.
“It’s very important that we don’t forget,” Freda said. “We have to have those memories to pass on. We don’t want this history to die.”
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