THROUGH
MOUNTAIN MISTS
Early Settlers of
Their
Descendants...Their Stories...Their Achievements
Lifting the
Mists of History on Their Way of Life
By: Ethelene Dyer Jones
Now we say “back in the olden
days.” That can be a long, long time ago
or when we
ourselves were children. In those days,
work on the farm had to be coordinated with the schedule of school in
session
if country boys and girls were to get anything like an adequate
education.
During the twenty-five year tenure of
Dr. Mauney Douglas Collins’s leadership as state school superintendent
(1933-1957), Georgia schools went from seven to nine months of school. Having long times out when schools were
closed for farm work was to be a thing of the past in Georgia. But
memories of
those times when farm work was coordinated with school sessions were a
part of
growing up on the farm. I recall how I
started to the brand new building at Choestoe School in July of 1936,
after
“laying by” of crops when the summer session began.
“Time to get ready for school,” my
mother gently shook my shoulder, awakening me.
Immediately I had a sinking feeling in
the pit of my stomach. Maybe I could beg
off, tell her I felt ‘sick to my stomach’ and I wouldn’t have to go to
school. It’s not that I didn’t want to
go. I just dreaded the unknown. I liked staying home, the familiar places and
routines. I liked watching my three-year
old brother Bluford while Mother worked.
Things with which I was comfortable
and familiar were about to change for an adventure called school. I reluctantly crawled out of bed, washed my
face and eyes with the warm wet washcloth my mother handed me. Then I put on my new flowered dress with a
white collar trimmed in rick-rack.
Mother had made it especially for me to wear on my first day at
school. It was a pretty “feed-sack”
dress. My father had let me select the
pattern of cloth on the feed bags when I went with him to the store to
buy the
feed. After the bags were empty of their
contents and carefully laundered and ironed, then my mother cut out my
dress
and made it on her Singer treadle-powered sewing machine.
I felt very dressed up. It would be
interesting to see if any of the
other girls at school would have a dress made from the same pattern of
cloth as
mine. If that happened, it would be all
right, for we all knew that our mothers made use of feed sacks to
fashion our
wardrobes.
After a breakfast of oatmeal,
scrambled egg, bacon, biscuits, gravy and a glass of milk, I was well
fed and
ready to leave for school after brushing my teeth.
My mother walked the mile with me on this
first day to get me used to going to school.
After talking to my teacher, Mrs. Mert Collins, probably giving
her
information about my birthdate, my mother left.
It was not long until Miss Opal Sullivan, the teacher of the
upper
grades, and considered the principal, too, rang a bell she held in her
hands,
the signal that “books” (as I learned the term later) or school-time
was to
begin.
We lined up in two rows in front
of our
beautiful, brand new Choestoe School building that had just been
finished by
men of the community working hard on it. This new building replaced a
very old
two-stories, two-room building that had served the community for years,
with an
upstairs where the Lodge met. The old
building had been torn down to make way for the new one. The new
schoolhouse
had two rooms and was only one-story.
One room was for grades Primer through third, and one for grades
four
through seven. Each room also had a
“cloak” room, a small anteroom where, in wintertime, we hung our coats
on pegs,
with book shelves for textbooks built in one end of the room, and a low
shelf
running the length of the room on which we set our lunch pails we had
brought
with us.
Once inside, a sense of
excitement
prevailed. Mrs. Mert kindly showed each
of the pupils where we were to sit by grades, although the size of the
desks
helped with that seating arrangement.
The primer/first grade desks were smaller than those of the
second and
third graders. She explained that we
were to go to the recitation bench alongside her teacher’s desk when we
were
having our lesson. When it was not our
time to recite (I learned that meant to read or do our numbers), we
were to
work quietly at our desks, practicing our letters and numbers or
reading
quietly. She opened a cabinet in one
corner of the room up front. She
explained that it had additional books that we could get—one at a
time—and take
to our seat to read. She encouraged us
to do this, assuring the primer/first graders that we, too, would soon
know how
to read.
And then class began. We stood and said the pledge of allegiance to
the United States flag which was at the front of the room, in a little
stand. Mrs. Mert (as she wanted us to
call her) read a Psalm from the Bible and led in a prayer.
And the first graders were called first to go
up to the bench to begin learning how to read.
Some of my classmates did not know the alphabet and the sounds
associated with each letter, but I already knew my letters and their
sounds. In fact, the little “Dick and
Jane” reader Mrs. Mert gave us seemed so simple to me.
I had already learned to read at home. My
older sister, Louise, and my brother,
Eugene (who were already in high school and met the bus at Morris Ford
to ride
it to Blairsville), had helped me with reading. So had my mother and
father. I could already read straight
through the Primer Reader. Mrs. Mert
must have wondered what she would do with me to keep me on task and
working. But I was to learn that she was
attuned to pupils and had a good grasp of how to meet their needs.
When she showed us the books
cabinet at the
front of the room, I made a personal
resolution to read all the books in that cabinet, one at a time, until
I had
read through all of them during the three years I was in this first
through
third grade classroom. That small
library in the corner of our classroom held such a fascination for me
that I
was never bored while in that room. Later, to bolster our desire to
read, Mrs.
Mert made a reading chart with each pupil’s name. As
we finished a book, and satisfied her that
we had read it by giving an oral or a written report, she would place a
star
after our name.
We had a mid-morning short
recess for water
(we brought our own glass from home) and rest room break (outside
toilets, one
for girls and one for boys fulfilled this need). Then
came more lessons, and at noon, we had a
longer break. We took our tin lunch
pails, got water in our glass from the water bucket in the cloak room
(Mrs.
Mert poured it so we wouldn’t spill it and make a wet mess), and then
went
outside to find a seat under the shade of the trees.
In my lunch pail Mother had packed a piece of
boiled corn and a baked sweet potato, a biscuit with bacon, and a piece
of
gingerbread. This fare was sufficient
and would do until I went home in mid-afternoon when a snack would
surely await
me. Lunch break was a longer time. The upper grades played a game of ball. Some pupils laid off a hop-scotch form on the
ground and played that in competition.
We younger children had pretend games, made a playhouse under
the trees,
or played tag. No playground equipment was available for use.
We made our own games.
Inside the school building, I
began to feel
quite at home. The dread of something new and different had quickly
dissipated.
That first day of school, in my first six-weeks session in July and
August
during the “summer school” and before we were out in the fall for
harvesting
crops—especially in my case working in the cane and assisting with
sorghum
syrup making—we had an idyllic summer.
Books opened up for me to wonderful worlds of adventure. I liked my teacher and my classmates. In fact, I liked school. Maybe
it was even then, in that wonderful
primary grades classroom, that I gained my desire to become a teacher
when I
grew up.
Thirteen years into the future
from my
first day of school, I would return to the same school in 1949, then as
the
only teacher in a school that had been reduced from two-teachers to one
because
of school population. I was a brand new
teacher, fresh out of Truett McConnell College with a two-year degree
and a
Georgia provisional teaching certificate.
I had twenty-five students in my class that fall, grades primer
through
seventh, at least one in every grade, with the largest class being
fifth grade
with five pupils. To be able to teach
was both a challenge and an opportunity.
I remembered my first day of school in that very building, and
had as my
aim making school both enjoyable and profitable, as my teacher Mrs.
Mert had
done for me in 1936.
[Ethelene Dyer
Jones is a retired educator,
freelance writer, poet, and historian. She may be reached at
e-mail edj0513@windstream.net;
phone 478-453-8751; or mail 1708 Cedarwood Road, Milledgeville, GA
31061-2411.]
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