SURRY, Va. -- The walls have been knocked down. The bricks crushed and swept away. Only grass and a spot of asphalt remain.

Brenda Hill noticed the spot immediately. She was driving down Highway 31 on her way to the hairdresser. She couldn't believe the one-story brick building she'd sat in front of and where sheid chatted with friends was gone.

The spot was so barren, it looked as though nothing had ever been there, as though L.P. Jackson High School had never existed.

Hill, who works at the Peninsula Health Department in Newport News, had attended L.P. Jackson from eighth to 11th grade.

When she realized the building had been torn down, Hill said, "It was as if someone burned down the house you grew up in. It was that kind of feeling"

For more than 20 years, Luther Porter Jackson High School in Dendron was home to many black students living in Surry County. It sat dormant for years after it closed, a relic of a time when the law prohibited black students from going to school with whites.

Then in one fatal swoop, five years ago, it was gone. Its walls, its doors and its history were knocked to the ground and discarded like trash. But "L.P.J." was more than a relic, its alumni say. It's a spirit. And no wrecking balls could demolish that.

Education ended at the 11th grade for blacks in 1940s Surry County. That was the highest grade county officials would fund for black students. A small wooden structure served as the Surry County Training School. This version of education for the countyis black teen-agers closed in 1950, when L.P. Jackson High opened.

Classes of 50 students at the training school were commonplace. There was no library. No gym. Hardly any books. It was a poor environment to teach in, said Alma Gibbs, who taught home economics in Surry from 1946 until she retired in 1978.

"In home economics in the old training school," Gibbs said, "everything was makeshift. We had one sewing machine, a tea kettle and a few dish pans, and that was it."

And you wouldn't drink too much water before you went to school, said Governor Hill Jr., a member of the L.P. Jackson class of 1951 now retired from Smithfield Foods. "I don't care if it was raining or shining," he said. "You had to go out the door, down the hill, into the woods to go to the bathroom," Hill added.