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
Lard Pail
Lunches and Shared Knowledge
(or Life in a Country School -- part 1)
Choestoe School in Union County,
Georgia,
1936 through 1943 has a special place in my memory, in things I love,
and in
who I became in life. It also figures in
my first year of a thirty-year teaching career, for it was there, where
I started
school, that I returned to teach my very first year as a young,
inexperienced,
fresh-out-of-junior-college state provisionally certified teacher.
Choestoe schoolhouse has been
moved from
its former location and now stands on land that was once my Daddy’s,
then my
brother’s, my own, my son’s, and now the county’s.
The old Choestoe school house is being
restored and will eventually be used as a voting precinct building and
perhaps
a community clubhouse.
But what took place there in the
building’s heyday as a schoolhouse? Come
with me to learn about “Lard Pail Lunches and Shared Knowledge.”
I received my early education in a
two-teacher country school from 1936 through 1943.
I never felt deprived educationally from this
inauspicious start. In high school,
college and graduate school, I regarded my elementary school education
as
excellent and special indeed.
Not only did I begin my education in a
two-teacher country school, but my first year of teaching was in that
same
school in 1949-1950. “You can’t go home
again,” as proposed by author Thomas Wolfe in his novel, Look
Homeward, Angel, did not apply to me. I
returned home to teach with anticipation
and joy, and gratitude that the Union County School Board would
consider a
product of that school to be worthy to teach there.
By 1949, due to declining pupil
population, Choestoe had become a one-teacher school.
Having attended that school myself the very
first year the “new” two-room building opened, and then returning
thirteen
years later to teach my first year there at the same school, were both
rich and
rewarding experiences for me.
Let us look at life in Choestoe School
from 1936 through 1943, the years I was a student in its hallowed halls. From Primer through Seventh Grade I was
educated at that school. Choestoe had
been an early school, although the building in which I attended was
brand new
in 1936. Previous schools had preceded
the one I knew so well. Early settlers
began the school, some of my ancestors with surnames like Dyer,
Souther, Collins,
Hunter, Nix, Self and England, to name a few.
Many of these forebears were in the county when it was founded
in
1832. And straightaway they began a
school at various locations, not necessarily on the same spot as the
new
building of 1936. Earlier, a log
building used for both school and church had been replaced by a
two-room,
two-story frame school building. On the
upper floor of the old building, the Choestoe Masonic Lodge met. I can vaguely remember attending events in
that building when my older brother Eugene and my sister Louise went to
school
there. Even as a young child, the steps
to the second floor fascinated me and I wondered what lay beyond the
confines
of what I could see.
The brand new building in which I
began my educational adventures in 1936 had two rooms, both on the
ground
level. A covered open vestibule-type
entrance was at the front. Two front
doors led in from the vestibule to the classrooms.
The “lower grades” (primer through third)
classroom was on the left and the “upper grades” (fourth through
seventh) was
on the right. Each classroom had a
cloak/storage room across the front where we had pegs to hang our coats
and
shelves to set our “lard bucket” lunch pails.
If we wore galoshes over our shoes in rainy or snowy weather, we
removed
them and left them in the cloak room while we were in class. Also in that room were bookcase shelves in
one end of the room on which the extra textbooks were aligned,
grade-wise.
The classrooms were separated by
a
removable partition, ceiled with wood on both sides.
I can remember my father and other men in the
community taking down those partitions to provide a large space. A raised stage was put in place and the
classrooms could then accommodate our school programs.
Each classroom was heated by a
wood heater,
an iron stove (not the usual “pot” bellied) a low, oblong heater with a
door on
the front into which to feed the wood.
Parents (or patrons of the school) were required to haul their
fair share
of the wood consumed throughout the months heat was needed. Long tin stovepipes connected the heater to
the common chimney that was outside the building about where the middle
partition was located that separated the classrooms.
That
first nervous day—in July, 1936—we students waited outside,
anticipating what
school might be like until “the principal,”—the upper-grades teacher,
rang the
school bell—our signal that “books” (or classes) were to begin. Miss Opal Sullivan was the upper grades
teacher, a trim, beautiful young lady who seemed to me then
all-too-young to be
a teacher. She stood in the school
entrance on the right side, awaiting her fourth through seventh grade
pupils to
line up in an orderly row. Mrs. Mert
Shuler Collins was the primary grades teacher.
She stood at the school entrance on the left side.
She patiently showed the new pupils like me
how to line up. When everyone was quiet
and in order, we were given the signal to proceed.
Once we were inside that primary
side of
the magnificent new school building, it was not hard for us to tell
which desks
were for the primer and first grade students.
The very smallest individual wooden desks were in a row nearest
the line
of tall, glowing windows. I quickly found
one in a location I liked, and soon it seemed to me that I had found a
new
home. And, indeed, I had, because from
that first day of school in 1936 until the present, I have found my
home-away-from home in classrooms, wherever they have opened welcoming
doors to
me.
[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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