pinestraw: Back to School
Moore Montessori breathes new life into an old building
By Jenna Biter
Photographs by John Gessner
Gold sparkles from a crack bisecting the concrete. Rather than banish the blemish to history with a swipe of mortar, someone at Moore Montessori Community School chose to draw eyes to the fissure by practicing the Japanese art of kintsugi — golden joinery — on the main hallway floor.
Developed to repair broken pottery, often tea sets, sometime around the 15th century, kintsugi restores an object’s function with glue and clay while highlighting evidence of the repair in metallic lacquer.
The art form treats the cycle of growth and decay as something to be appreciated rather than disguised, a philosophy that lives comfortably at Moore Montessori in that crack in the floor of its recently renovated school on Massachusetts Avenue in Southern Pines.
Previously known as “B Building,” now Voss Hall in recognition of generous support from the Voss family, the Georgian Revival originally opened for the 1948–49 school year. The neoclassical structure remained part of Southern Pines city schools and then the county school system for more than seven decades — through segregation, integration and beyond — until 2021.
That’s when Moore Montessori purchased the L-shaped building, distinguished by its gracious columned porch and endless stretch of yawning windows, along with the rest of the old elementary school campus, for $1.6 million.
“The front building on May Street was basically turnkey,” says Moore Montessori’s founder and head of school, Katherine Rucker, “but this building needed quite a bit of renovation.”
Two years of improvements and a community’s worth of sweat equity later, Voss Hall partially reopened for the start of school in 2023, with the final wing of the public charter school reopening that winter.
Thanks to Moore Montessori, an old school has new life.
Across from the May Street churches, uphill on East Massachusetts Avenue past Emmanual Episcopal, Voss Hall is a neat red brick building with wide steps and a wrought iron railing leading up to a pair of welcoming white doors. The sprawling structure occupies more than 17,000 square feet, set back a generous distance from the road where lilting birdsong could convince passersby they’ve stepped into a nature preserve.
On Sept. 3, 1948, soon after the school opened, The Pilot printed a description that could still be written today: “The one-story building, whose external architecture is Georgian Colonial (there is nothing Colonial about its modern-as-tomorrow interior), is on a large, wooded lot, its beautiful entrance shaded by the longleaf pines and magnolia trees which are distinctively Southern Pines.”
With the expertise of Raleigh architect Tim Martin and monies raised in a capital campaign, Moore Montessori was able to preserve that original picture while updating the interior to remain “modern as tomorrow” well into the next generation.
“I was just trying to get out of the way of the building coming back into its own,” Martin says.
The school’s original architect, the prolific William H. Deitrick (1895–1974), known for his completion of the potato chip-shaped Dorton Arena in Raleigh, had designed the building in elegant, hand-drawn blueprints that now hang on the walls of Voss Hall. The tail end of 2021 saw the start of renovations that returned the school closer to Deitrick’s vision.
“The first step was to waterproof the building while maintaining the historical authenticity of the Buckingham slate roof,” Rucker says. Slate roofs are very nearly a lost art, and the original stone tiles for this particular build came from a quarry in Buckingham County, Virginia, hence Buckingham slate.
Despite the challenges, Moore Montessori found a slate-savvy crew from Charlotte to order the rock and complete the job. The flashing was redone and the eyebrow dormers were coppered, as was the weather-vaned cupola that crowns the roof.
“The next summer we worked on waterproofing the windows,” Rucker says. The school still has its original 9-foot-tall, single-pane windows that needed to be reglazed and repainted.
“Then it was time to take on the interior,” Rucker says. That’s when Martin came onto the project. “Tim has a passion for restoring buildings using current footprints and materials that are already there, with minimal extras.”
That meant reclaiming the original, in-class bathrooms for easy access, stripping away carpets to reveal concrete floors, rearranging a few walls and repainting them all, updating the HVAC system, and removing the dropped ceiling that had been added sometime in the ’80s.
Rucker actually attended grades four through eight in the very building she now heads. “I remember the blue carpet. I remember the lockers, the cubbies, which we still have,” she says. “I don’t remember the windows being as extraordinary as they are now.”
The ceilings had been dropped to minimize the space that needed to be heated and cooled, and the view through the windows suffered. With the ceiling height and view now restored, Moore Montessori is clawing back efficiency by way of passive heating and cooling. Cross breezes flow through open windows, and a dehumidification system and ceiling fans have been added. This way, the school shouldn’t have to rely on its new HVAC system as life support while it’s in session.
During the summer, it’s easy to see the empty building as just another historical renovation project, but come the end of another August, a rainbow of backpacks will hang in the hallway, while children pre-K through third grade work away inside classrooms aglow with natural light and the low hum of learning, as they did last year.
At one table in a primary classroom, a youngster presses his lips into a thin line of concentration while polishing a dinosaur figurine made of silver. The next table over, a vase of neatly arranged flowers hints that a pair of little hands has recently completed the task.
“Montessori is small group; it’s hands-on materials,” says Rucker, explaining why the students weren’t lined up in rows, all learning the same material, like in a traditional classroom. “The hand is the tool of the mind, and you learn by doing. When they’re ready for the next lesson, they can get it and work on it until they master it.”
Down the hall, in a lower elementary classroom, five or six students sit crisscross around a floor mat while a teacher shares a lesson. A few feet away, three other children are working together around a low table, called a chowki.
“There’s no front or center of a Montessori classroom,” Rucker says.
Each long, rectangular classroom has clean, white walls. They’re filled with wooden, child-sized furniture punctuated with splashes of color. “There’s no teacher’s desk. It’s a space designed for children. There are different areas to work — at desks, chowkis or on rugs,” she says.
Near the trio at the chowki, a blond-haired boy arranges tactile cursive letters to name objects: “dune,” “mule,” “tube.” The contented, self-directed activity is the goal of Montessori instruction, an educational model designed to put kids in the driver’s seat.
“I just think this is one of the most beautiful school buildings in North Carolina,” Rucker says. “It’s just so awesome. It’s one story, it’s accessible, it’s beautiful, and it’s ideal for Montessori, so I feel really lucky that we were able to save it.”
And, in the process, honoring the cycle of growth to make it a place of learning once again. PS
Jenna Biter is a writer and military wife in the Sandhills. She can be reached at jennabiter@protonmail.com.