ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 2, 1996 TAG: 9606030012
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-16 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: FLOYD
SOURCE: TRACY WHITAKER STAFF WRITER
If you sit quietly on the well-worn front steps of Double Springs School, a one-room school in rural Floyd County, you almost expect to hear the voices of children pledging allegiance to the flag or singing "My Country, 'Tis Of Thee." Dorothy "Dot" Vest, 81, opens the white plank door to the 19th-century school where she taught grades one through seven in the 1930s.
"If these walls could talk," Vest says, her glance sweeping around the familiar room.
She pulls a rope that hangs through the ceiling, just inside the door. The bell's clang fills the air, clear and compelling.
Once upon a time girls in gingham playing hopscotch and boys in overalls kneeling in circles in the dust, determined to win a prized aggie, were called back to their lessons by a similar sound.
During her first year of teaching in 1934, Vest, then 18, met her future husband there.
The school, named Double Springs for the springs on either side of the property, has been restored to near original condition by Vest and the owner, Mason Lee Whitenack, 65, of Roanoke.
Double Springs School is on private property. Whitenack and his family will continue to maintain it. Vest has known that family for years. She boarded in Whitenack's parents' home while she taught at Camp Creek, another Floyd County one room school.
A teacher's wages in those days averaged $65 a month. Vest's expenses were $59, including room and board and her tuition loan payments.
"I still had enough money left over for a new dress every month," she says. "Mrs. Whitenack would sew you a new dress for three yards of cloth. I would buy six yards of gingham at 10 cents a yard. Three yards would go into her dress, and three would go into mine."
"Mason Lee's mother was a wonderful woman," Vest says. "She would wash and iron my dresses and lay them out on my bed. She treated me like one of her own children."
When Dot Vest taught Mason Whitenack in one of her first-grade classes, neither could have imagined that nearly 60 years later they would find themselves back at work inside the old schoolhouse.
Its interior, smelling of old books, is bright with late spring sunshine streaming through the old wavy panes of its five tall windows.
A print of the familiar Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, stern and solemn as ever on his white cloud of unfinished background, presides from high on the back wall.
"George was here in 1934, too," Vest says. She bought the print when the building was sold in the 1950s.
A pot-bellied stove similar to the one that warmed the school in the old days dominates the middle of the room.
"We used to bring vegetables or a bit of meat and cook a big pot of soup while we did our lessons. That good smell would fill up the room, and by lunch time everyone would be ready to eat," Vest says.
"I reckon you could say that was how hot school lunches began.
"And this was my desk." The desk, tiny as a nightstand, barely accommodates a sheaf of notes and a textbook.
Arranged in careful rows are student desks of different eras. Five have been fashioned from iron frames, like those used early in the century. The top of one desk connects to a sloping wood panel that forms the back and seat of the next.
A washstand in one corner holds a water bucket and dipper. When Vest began teaching in the 1930s, indoor plumbing in rural schools - and in many homes - was just wishful thinking. But the school's old outhouse is long gone.
A worn slate board hangs near the door, its dusty surface cracked and pitted from thousands of lessons. A small shelf of books represents the school's library. Former students have contributed readers and spellers to the collection.
Outside, the tiny belfry just above the door once again holds a bell, like the one Vest rang decades ago. The white clapboard walls gleam. Coats of paint have been applied with care to boards worn smooth by decades of weather and hours of scraping and sanding.
Double Springs was among many one-room schools built in Floyd County after the state required every county to have a public school system in place by 1876. Floyd County had 52 one-room schools enrolling about 2,430 students by February of that year.
At Double Springs, a structure originally called Flint School was built in 1876 for $275, according to Sarah Simmons, a professor of education at Roanoke College.
"From 1870 through the late 1930s, there were approximately 155 one-room schools started in Floyd County. The figure includes schools like Double Springs, which may have been counted twice since the name was changed from Flint School to Double Springs," says Simmons, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the history of Floyd County's school system.
Dot Vest believes that around the turn of the century, the cabin that housed Flint School was moved and Double Springs School built.
The decaying schoolhouse, which had been used for decades to store corn and hay, was a gift from Whitenack's father, who purchased the building and its acre lot in the early 1950s for his son, who was in the Air Force. Whitenack retired from ITT Electro Optical Products Division in Roanoke in 1992 and began cleaning up the lot, then covered with briars and brambles.
"The more I did, the better it looked. It kind of got to be a hobby of mine. First I cleared off the lot, then started fooling with the building." Whitenack says.
"Dot started working on the restoration with me in 1993. We didn't have any grand plan. We just kind of did this and that as we went along. I've known Hugh and Dot Vest about all my life. Dot and I met when she was a young teacher and came to board with our family."
Whitenack and Vest haven't kept tabs on the cost; the project has been a labor of love. While neither of their spouses have been as involved, they have been supportive.
"I couldn't have done any of this without Hugh's encouragement," said Vest.
Former students and their children, many of whom still live in or near Floyd County, have donated items representative of the supplies and furnishings used in schools early in this century - and, of course, there's not a computer in sight.
"The day I got my class assignment, I was issued a broom and a box of chalk." Vest says. "That was our ration of teaching supplies."
LENGTH: Long : 127 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: GENE DALTON/Staff. 1. A former teacher and pupil haveby CNBteamed up to restore Floyd County's Double Springs School (ran on
NRV-1). 2. Former teacher Dot Vest stands in the one-room
schoolhouse where she began her career in Floyd County in the 1930s.
She and the building's owner, Mason Whitenack, have restored the
school to much the same condition it was in when Vest taught there.
3. Dot Vest recalls the days when she used to ring the Double
Springs School bell, calling students to class in the one-room
school. 3. Former students and their children, many of whom still
live in or near Floyd County, have donated items representative of
the supplies and furnishings used in Double Springs (above and left)
that help make the atmosphere what it was like 60 years ago. color.
4. Mason Lee Whitenack is owner of the school he once attended.