Lard Pail Lunches and Shared Knowledge (or Life in a Country School ~ Part 3)

Through the past two columns, I have shared memories of attending and teaching my first year in the same country school. I hope this journey back in time brought to mind some good memories of your “grade school” years, wherever you attended. It is good to remember foundations in life that helped to mold and make us into life-long learners. I was fortunate to gain a good education even under what may seem now a rather outdated system. To conclude this series on life in a country school, I will pinpoint some memorable incidents that made a lasting impression on me.

We had in the corner of each of the two classrooms at Choestoe School a wooden cabinet with doors. This book cabinet was the “library” for that particular classroom. When we finished our assignments, we had freedom to go to that cabinet, select a book from the shelf, take it to our desk and read it quietly. It was a great achievement in first grade to have learned phonics and “sounding out” words well enough to become competent to select a book to read from our “library” resources. The teachers, to encourage good reading habits, kept a chart with students’ names on the wall beside the book cabinet. A colored star was placed beside the name of each student who successfully read and reported to the teacher on books from this cabinet. These “star” awards seemed to work well as motivational devices to encourage reading. I often wondered how the library was furnished with books. That old classroom library was there in 1936, and it seemed to grow more books year by year—even before the days when Dr. M. D. Collins led state schools to have library resources and before the bookmobile from the regional public library began to make its regular monthly stop at Choestoe School. The bookmobile was an innovation by the time I taught there in the 1948-1949 school year. My life-time love for reading and books was encouraged by that library cabinet in a reading corner of Choestoe classroom long ago.

I recall a memorable field trip. When I was a seventh grader in 1943 at Choestoe School, and just prior to going to high school by riding the bus the next school year, we had our first-ever field trip. Mrs. Florence Hunter was my teacher, and she was known for getting things done. Her husband, Mr. Joe Hunter, was a county school bus driver. So Mrs. Florence and he made arrangements and got permission to take the fourth-through-seventh graders to Atlanta on a Saturday. All who could go loaded on that old bus early, early on a Saturday morning while it was still dark. We had a most memorable trip to visit the State Capitol building, the Atlanta Zoo, and the Cyclorama. I had never been to Atlanta before that notable trip, and that was probably true of the other children on that bus trip. Mrs. Florence managed to take snacks and drinks, and we had been instructed to bring our own lunch as we would have a picnic at Grant Park. What a notable building was our capitol where state government was conducted. How interesting to see all the strange animals at the zoo, some we had only read about and seen pictures of in books at Choestoe School. Then the panorama and story of the Civil War in Atlanta in the Cyclorama display was a first-hand, up close lesson in history.

We were a group of exhausted young children, sleeping on the long trip from Atlanta back to Choestoe after a full and exciting day. I’ve thought many times about how meaningful that trip was for us children, and of the sacrifice in time, money and influence expended by Mr. and Mrs. Hunter. They were able to give us a first-hand view of life beyond the confines of our mountain community. And to look back now and realize that in 1943 when we made that field trip during World War II, there was gasoline and tire rationing. For Mr. Hunter to be able to use some of his allotment of scarce items to take country school children to Atlanta was indeed a notable happening.

Graduation from that country school was a memorable occasion. We had a graduation program, not only with the two top graduates speaking with valedictory and salutatory addresses, but we had a program in which other grades participated with music and recitations. In fact, some of the programs we had for parents at that school during my seven years of learning there were so poignant that I can remember even now lines of poems I memorized to recite. Even though our teachers had few resources, they managed to make learning challenging and interesting. They gave us opportunities such as “Parents’ Night” or “Parents’ Day” when we could “show and tell” some of the things we had learned.

When I graduated from seventh grade country school, my future career as a teacher was already in my mind. I knew I wanted to be a teacher. In that way I could somehow repay Mrs. Mert Shuler, my own sister, Louise Dyer, Miss Opal Sullivan, Mrs. Bonnie Snow, and Mrs. Florence Hunter who had been my able teachers in my seven years as a student at Choestoe School. And so it was that in 1948 I returned to that same school, armed with two years of college and a provisional Georgia teacher’s certificate, ready to teach. As I greeted the twenty-five students in seven grades—for the school, by the time I returned to teach there—had a drop in student population and only one teacher could be hired for the seven grades. Talk about a challenge—a first-year teacher and twenty-five eager students scattered in every grade from first through seventh! I conducted classes much as my own teachers had done in the seven years when I was a student in that school. I had an excellent helper in a very brilliant seventh grade student named Shirley. Without neglecting her own instruction, I allowed her to help me mentor some of the younger students with their math, spelling and reading.

Looking back, I count that year as a teacher in country school as one of my happiest and best, although it was hard, with all the responsibilities falling to me. In that first year of my thirty-year teaching career, I learned to be teacher and administrator, how to cultivate parental support, how to instruct with enthusiasm and how to motivate students to achieve. I had learned to teach by having been taught myself by exemplary role models.

Education has gone through many changes since those days from 1936-1943 when I was a student in country school and took my lunch in a lard pail and had the privilege of shared knowledge because students learned from each other as well as from the teacher. And my year of teaching there, 1948-1949, was foundational to who I became as a teacher. Have we lost some significant aspects of education in these modern days? Then we had the privilege of learning from and being challenged by upper classmen whose recitations we heard. We had concepts drilled into us until the learning became second nature. There is much to laud and praise for our heritage of “lard pail lunches and shared knowledge.” Then eager students gathered at a country school under the auspices of ones called and dedicated to the important role of teacher.

c2011 by Ethelene Dyer Jones; published November 10, 2011 in The Union Sentinel, Blairsville, GA. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

April: National Poetry Month

As a lover of poetry and a poet of sorts, I am very interested in April, set aside as National Poetry Month, thirty whole days to celebrate poetry. With your indulgence, I want to depart from my usual history column and write about poetry.

April as National Poetry Month was inaugurated in 1996 by the American Academy of Poets, a non-profit organization promoting the vitality and value of poetry in American culture. National Poetry Month has grown since 1996 to be the single largest literary celebration in the world.

We have but to examine America’s early history to find that our forebears practiced the art of poetry. America’s founders brought an amalgam of cultures composing our original population. From the countries in the old world they brought their love for poetry and their ability, in many instances, to write poetry, to catch a deep and abiding truth in concise lines. This appreciation for poetry has grown through America’s years as a nation and will continue through the present and future generations.

The Academy of American Poets set up as the overriding aim of a whole month of celebrating poetry as a time to make poetry more visible and accessible to citizens. This year’s National Poetry Month has seven specific goals:

1. To highlight the extraordinary legacy and ongoing achievement of American poets.
2. To introduce more Americans to the pleasure of poetry.
3. To bring poets and poetry to the attention of the public in immediate and innovative ways.
4. To make poetry a more important part of the school curriculum.
5. To increase the attention paid to poetry by national and local media.
6. To encourage increased publication, distribution and sales of poetry books.
7. To increase public and private philanthropic support for poetry and poets.

Even though the month of April 2006 is in its last two weeks, it is still not too late to make poetry more visible and accessible to citizens. Just now, with the writing of this column, and your reading it, we are fulfilling Goal 5 above. If you are a teacher reading this column, I hope you will think of ways you can increase your students’ appreciation of poetry in the days remaining of April, 2006. Your local book store has poetry books for sale. Buy one and read it with joy and pleasure. If you have the capability of going online, you may access the Academy of American Poets and see the thirty-day suggestions of innovative things to do during each day of April to make poetry come alive for yourself and others.

And, being a great fan of Union County’s Byron Herbert Reece (1917-1958), poet extraordinary, I can plead for you to fulfill Goal 7 listed above by supporting the Byron Herbert Reece Society’s aim of making the Reece Farm into a cultural center to honor the poet and his poetry, and to aid future poets who might be inspired as they visit the place where Reece thought so deeply and wrote so admirably.

I cannot close this article without sharing some personal thoughts of how I have celebrated April, National Poetry Month, to this date. I have sent my original poems to several people in letters and sympathy cards already during this month, and I will continue to do so until the end of April, and, indeed, all year long. To dear friends and relatives who have lost loved ones during the month of April, I sent them my sonnet entitled “Death at Times Is Kind.”

For my first great grandchild, born April 12, 2006, I printed and framed my poem entitled “This Clay to Mold – A Mother to Her Child,” which I hope my dear granddaughter Paula will take to heart and use as a sort of idealistic guide for motherhood as she rears the precious baby, Gavin Ernesto Berenguer-Aguirre, entrusted to her and Ernesto for rearing.

A dear younger friend of mine, Beverly Michelle Denmark, has published during this month of April her first book of poems entitled “Sipping Coffee.” I received my copy of the book from her, signed by the author, with the notation that through Georgia Poetry Society I had inspired her to write. I will write a book review of Beverly’s book, and hope thereby to help her with publicity for her book and to increase her book sales.

I thought how I would like to go into the schools and teach poetry workshops as I once did, or teach my own classes (as I did prior to my retirement) the beauty of poetry and how students can write their own. Just now, my circumstances of care-giving for my husband do not permit me to engage in this much-loved activity. But I can appreciate all the teachers from my past who made me a lover of poetry from elementary school through college and graduate school. At Choestoe School, a two-teacher school when I attended there, my teachers loved poetry and taught me to appreciate it. It was then I memorized “The Village Blacksmith” and “Song of the Chattahoochee,” and other poems for “recitation” day on Fridays. Thank you, Mrs. Mert Collins, Ms. Opal Sullivan, Mrs. Bonnie Snow, Mrs. Florence Hunter and others for instilling in me the love of poetry when I was young. I have never departed from that appreciation of poetry, and my love for poetry has grown with the years.

I will end this appeal for you to celebrate and enjoy poetry during April, National Poetry Month, by ending with Byron Herbert Reece’s quatrain that says so much about the love of poetry and how it is written. His aim certainly has come true:

“From chips and chards in idle times,
I made these stories, shaped these rhymes;
May they engage some friendly tongue
When I am past the reach of song.”

c2006 by Ethelene Dyer Jones; published Apr. 20, 2006 in The Union Sentinel, Blairsville, GA. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

To Consolidate Schools or Not? That was the Big Question in 1916 and Later ( A History of Education in Union County, Part 3)

I began my teaching career in the same school I entered as a first grader when the new two-teacher Choestoe school building opened. Back in 1936, we were so proud of our new white weather-boarded school building, a great improvement over the previous old building that stood on the same spot near Choestoe Baptist Church.

When the school had first opened there in the 1830’s, classes were held in the log church building. Then the two-room building specifically for school was built, with an upstairs where the Lodge met in “secret” quarters. I do not have statistics for many of the years of Choestoe School, but in 1933, three years before I began as a first grader there, 69 students had been enrolled and C. J. Dyer and B. H. Rich were the teachers.

I did not attend school in the old building but was a proud first grader in 1936 when the new building opened with its shiny white paint outside, its tall windows, the “lower” grades room for students in 1st through 3rd grades, and the “upper” grades room for students in grades 4th through 7th grades.

Each classroom had its own “cloak” and supply room where we hung our coats on pegs and put our lunch pails on shelves. Extra textbooks and a few school supplies were also stored in the cloak rooms. The classrooms were heated by a wood heater and patrons (including my father, J. Marion Dyer) supplied the wood for the stoves. We brought our water supply in a bucket from a spring on church property until, about my third year there, a well was dug in the schoolyard and a hand pump (which always had to be primed) was installed. We each took our own cups with our lunch pails in order to have one for water when we were thirsty.

Mrs. Mert Shuler Collins was my first grade teacher and encouraged me to read, read, read. I already knew how to read when I entered school, having learned at my mother’s and my older siblings’ knees, probably pestering them so much that they felt to teach me to read for myself would be better than to spend so much of their valuable time reading to me. My aim in first grade was to read every book in the cabinet in the corner of the classroom where extra books were housed just for the students’ pleasure. I didn’t reach my goal that year, but remember the chart with many stars that represented each book completed.

Several teachers held the wonderful Choestoe School together in my first through seventh grade journey. My beloved teachers were Mrs. Mert Collins, my sister, Louise Dyer, Mrs. Opal Sullivan, Mrs. Bonnie Snow and her husband (as a substitute), Mr. Lon Snow, and Mrs. Florence Hunter. These opened for me the remarkable world of learning.

When I entered Union County High School in 1943 as an 8th grader and freshman, I had not suffered one whit from receiving my elementary education in a two-teacher country school.

By the school year 1949-50 when I began as an eager first-year teacher at Choestoe School, enrollment was down so that it was a one-teacher school. I had pupils in every grade first through seventh, a total of twenty-five students in all, with the largest enrollment being 5th grade with five pupils. The school did not have kindergarten, but those just starting out were in “Primer,” where they learned in the first few months the rudiments of reading so that they could progress through Primer and First Grade in their first year at Choestoe. In retrospect, I wonder how I, a brand new teacher, managed seven grades and taught the students even the minimum of what they needed to learn at their specific grade levels. Looking back on my thirty-plus years as an educator, I still remember the wonder and challenge of that first year in what had been reduced to a one-teacher school. I had begun in that building as a first grader; my fist year of teaching was in the Choestoe School; and it was ripe for closure and inevitable consolidation which came at the end of that year.

Returning to the 1916 report, Mr. M. L. Duggan, Rural School Agent for Georgia, gave recommendations following his three-month survey of education in the county. He listed schools and gave reasons for and against consolidation of the 43 schools he found operating at that time.

The Blairsville Collegiate Institute was going well in 1916 with 150 pupils enrolled in eleven grades. H. E. Nelson was principal, and taught mathematics and English. His wife, Mrs. H. E. Nelson, taught history, science and Latin. Miss Addie Kate Reid taught the intermediate grades. Miss June Candler taught primary grades. Music teacher was Mrs. Maud Haralson and Miss Etta Colclough taught Home Economics and also served as a sort of county home economist, visiting in homes and assisting women in proper methods of canning and preserving foods from their gardens and farms. The private institute had eight full months of uninterrupted instructional time and was doing well, indeed. From 1916 through its closure at the end of the 1929-1930 school year, it was to have fourteen more successful years of operation before it became the Blairsville—and subsequently---the Union County High School.

In the district around Suches in 1916, Mr. Duggan found three schools: Zion had Mr. G. W. Garrard as teacher, classes were in a church building, he had no equipment and only seven students. Mt. Lebanon School had Mrs. Ray Pruitt as teacher, met in a ceiled, unpainted building, had oiled floors, homemade desks, blackboards, a sandbox, and maps, charts and pictures. The pupils in five grades numbered 55. The Mt. Airy School met in the church building with 27 pupils and C. T. Lunsford as teacher. Mr. Duggan highly recommended that these three schools be consolidated, that an increase in taxes make Mt. Lebanon a “standard school,” and that students all attend Mt. Lebanon, which would be only about three and one-half miles for those farthest away.

A look at the 1933 county school statistics reveals that his recommendation was not accomplished to that date. Mrs. F. F. Pruitt was listed as teacher that year at Mt. Lebanon with 33 students and Mr. J. H. Lunsford, also there, with 30 pupils. Mt. Airy was still operating in 1933 with 20 pupils, and Zion with 23 pupils had Ms. Eula Berry as teacher. The schools at Suches were finally consolidated when Woody Gap School opened in the fall of 1940 near the homesite of Georgia’s Civil War governor, Joseph Emerson Brown. Today Woody Gap is considered an “isolated” school because of the mountains separating the district from Blairsville and the distance in travel prohibitive for pupils who would be transported.

[Next week: Continuing the look at 1916 and later school developments.]

c2004 by Ethelene Dyer Jones; published August 19, 2004 in The Union Sentinel, Blairsville, GA. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Good Old-Fashioned Christmases

For all of you who have become faithful readers since July 31, 2003 when “Through Mountain Mists” first appeared in this paper, Happy Christmas. Go with me on a personal journey to Christmases Past. May this odyssey through the mists to a simpler time bring to your mind remembrances of good Christmases of decades ago.

When I was a child I did not give much thought to what went into Christmas except for my want list and a special time of year that seemed a long time in coming. In retrospect, I can understand how hard it must have been for my parents and other kin to provide a good holiday season from the want and penury often experienced during the days of the Great Depression and World War II.

Christmas celebrations hinged around the local school and church. I went to a two-teacher country school, Choestoe, and there in the “little room” (primer through third grades) and the “big room” (fourth through seventh grades), preparations were made by our diligent teachers to make our school Christmas program a special time. I went to the “new” Choestoe School, a building erected in 1936 just in time for me to begin first grade there. It had the unusual feature of a removable partition between the two classrooms, and for special occasions like the Christmas play (or the commencement program at the end of the school year), the partitions were taken down and one large room was formed with a movable stage set against the windows on the north side of the building. There, after days of rehearsing, we performed our Christmas recitations and pageant to a packed house of parents who came to proudly own their children who were in the limelight. I remember some of those teachers who worked with us: Mrs. Mert Shuler, Miss Mary Dyer, and my own sister, Mrs. Louise Dyer, with the primary groups; Miss Opal Sullivan, Mrs. Florence Hunter, and Mrs. Bonnie Snow with upper grades. There were others, of course, but these were teachers for various years I was a student at Choestoe School. We “drew” names and got an inexpensive gift for the person whose name we drew. My gift usually came from my Grandpa Bud Collins’s country store, or else my dad, J. Marion Dyer, would make a trip to Blairsville to “buy Christmas.”

The larger boys had been to somebody’s woods and cut a pine tree, and part of the preparation was making colored paper chains to decorate the tree and stringing popcorn the teacher had brought from home. There were no lights to illuminate the tree, because Choestoe School did not then have electricity. How the teachers managed to get small gifts for each of their children on the meager salary they drew is a mystery to me. I remember pencils with our name imprinted, a pencil box, and small paper bags with candy and an orange or apple. We went home from the school Christmas program feeling good from our performance, the accolades it brought, and our little gifts.

The church Christmas program was not much different from that at school except that our pageant was always a reenactment of the Christmas Story from Luke and Matthew. How all the girls longed to be Mary or angels. If not selected for these parts, we were in the choir to sing Christmas carols or had a special poem to learn and recite. To forget lines, either at school or at church, was an anxious fear. If it happened, we were embarrassed. At church as well as at school, we drew names for giving gifts, and we could expect a bag of goodies from our Sunday School teachers at church.

I cannot remember Santa Claus ever appearing at any of my childhood school and church programs. Maybe some areas had this jolly old Saint Nick, but we did not at Choestoe. Perhaps it was too hard to come by a red suit back then.

At home, our Christmas celebrations were simple. We children could expect one gift from Santa and some candy and fruits in our stockings “hung by the chimney with care.” At Christmas oranges were a once-a-year treat. Dad also purchased boxes of stick candy--peppermint, licorice, and horehound. We sometimes had the rare treat of “cocolate drops” or Hershey’s kisses.

I can remember the Christmas when my little brother Bluford got a “Radio Flyer” wagon as his major gift. Earlier, when I was five, I got a beautiful China doll I had spied pictured in the Sears-Roebuck catalog. I yearned for that doll with a passion and wrote more than one letter to Santa requesting it. Although I was only five, that was the same Christmas I learned that Santa had a very special helper in my father, because on the box the doll came in was his writing: “To Ethelene from Santa.” He must have forgotten that I already knew how to read, even though I had not been to school. I knew it was he who had labeled my special gift. I kept the knowledge of Santa to myself for at least three more years, fearing that if I let the secret out I might not get the Christmas gifts I yearned for.

Christmas holiday meals were interchanged between Grandpa Collins’ home and Grandma Dyer’s home, always with a large crowd of family at both places. Maybe my mother took food, too. I don’t remember. These were solid meals but not necessarily fancy. We grew turkeys for market, and at Christmas one was prepared for the meal. Wonderful country-cured ham was also a part of the meal as were the dried fruits and preserved vegetables from our bountiful harvest.

We had candy-pullings as community holiday parties. My older sister Louise and my older brother Eugene sometimes hosted these events with other young people from the community invited. The sorghum syrup, with baking soda added, was boiled to a certain consistency noted by letting a drop fall into a cup of cold water. Then the candy was beaten for awhile until it was cool enough to take in hand and pull and pull. The sorghum candy was twisted into sticks, and later cut. It was a tasty treat. Especially delightful were the popcorn balls made with the sorghum syrup cooked to candy consistency to hold the popped corn together. Roasted chestnuts, chinquapins, and peanuts added to the refreshments at Christmas socials in the community, and sugar cookies and gingerbread men were also enjoyed.

In that simple time we didn’t notice that we could not afford all the goodies displayed in the Sears-Roebuck catalog. To have one special gift and really appreciate it was treasure enough and to be surrounded by the love of family and friends was a true Christmas treat.

c2003 by Ethelene Dyer Jones; published Dec. 18, 2003 in The Union Sentinel, Blairsville, GA. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.