Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 29, 1990 TAG: 9006300405
SECTION: SMITH MOUNTAIN TIMES PAGE: SMT-4 EDITION: BEDFORD/FRANKLIN
SOURCE: By LAURA HUNT SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The Glade Hill School is one of about 300 old schools that once served Franklin County. Some of them sit vacant and dilapidated. Some are used for storage by their present owners. A few have been remodeled as homes. Some no longer exist.
No matter what their condition, they will not be forgotten - thanks to the efforts of the Franklin County Retired Teachers' Association. The group has sewn a quilt with the names of about 300 old schools on it.
Virginia Kelley, who taught for 40 years in Franklin County before retiring in 1975, got the idea from a similar quilt Scott County displayed at a state meeting of retired teachers in October 1988. A couple of people Kelley ran into after the conference liked the idea of a quilt and thought Franklin County should have one.
Eighteen months later, the quilt was completed.
Kelley, 76, doesn't know the history of all the schools on the quilt; in fact, she doesn't even know where some of them were. But she can talk for hours retelling history and spinning anecdotes about the schools she does know about.
In the 1880s, Kelley's father, Letcher English, attended Old Salem School. The school, which had first through seventh grades, is located off Virginia 40 near Union Hall. "There was one classroom, and everyone was in it, and the woodshed, the stove and the water bucket, too," Kelley said. "At times it was a real big school - 40 or 50 children."
Although no students have learned reading, writing and arithmetic at Old Salem for about 40 years, the school still looks sturdy. Day lilies, not weeds, grow beside the door.
A few miles away on Virginia 718 in Glade Hill is a building with a rusty tin roof and weathered boards that show signs of having once been white. This building was Glade Hill School from about 1907 to 1922.
Kelley, who attended the two-room school from 1920 to 1922, remembers this school had something special - a bell.
"There was a bell somewhere up in the attic," Kelley said, pointing to the roof. "I never saw it, but I saw the rope. And the principal would ring it for school to take up and at the end of recess." One of the two teachers also served as principal.
"Often we played in the road because there wasn't anything coming," Kelley said. "If there was, it was a horse and buggy. There were probably only 10 or 15 cars in the county then."
The building was used as a house after it closed, Kelley said. Now it is used for storage.
When the building closed in 1922, the students went to the new Glade Hill School next to the present-day Glade Hill Elementary School. This school housed first through ninth grades until it became a senior high school in 1935.
Now overgrown and sagging, the school was built by Linwood and Cabel English. It had four classrooms, a library, an office and a hallway. As the need arose, the library, office and hall were converted into classrooms, and former one-room schoolhouses were moved to the site and attached to the building to make more space for students, Kelley said.
This school was one of the first in the county to have a lunchroom. The woodshed was used as the lunchroom for a while until the cafeteria was opened. Most of the food was grown at the school and served to students for a few cents. Students without money would bring a can of tomatoes, a bag of onions, some beans or whatever food their families had as payment, Kelly said.
The Redwood School, off Virginia 40 between Redwood and Rocky Mount, is one school that has been preserved. It is now a Woodmen of the World lodge.
W.M. Hagood sold the land for the school to the county in 1931 for $1. Tom Jack Thurman gave the rights for the school to use a spring on his land, and Thurman and Tom Amos built the four-room school. The three large rooms were classrooms and a small room was the library until it was needed as a classroom, Kelley said.
Kelley wanted to preserve some of that history, not just the names. The quilt lists all the schools that association members could remember and all the names Kelley could find going through the School Board office files. It also depicts school life. Decorating the quilt are some multiplication tables, outhouses, a lunch-pail shelf, a diagrammed sentence, games the children played and a pot-bellied stove.
Other steps are being taken to preserve educational history in Franklin County. The board of supervisors appropriated $6,000 June 16 to move the old Duncan School House from Virginia 122 and 616 to Dudley School property for restoration.
Now, Kelley is looking for a place to display the quilt where the most people can enjoy it. She also is trying to find a way to get money for the quilt to establish a scholarship for a student who plans to become a teacher. The quilt is a tribute to education of the past, but Kelley and others who worked on the quilt also are interested in the eduction of the future.
by CNB