Appalachian History

It's September; time to head back to school.

Here's an outdoor class being held at the Othello School in Cherokee County, GA, circa 1925. The teacher is believed to be Miss Corine Pace. Third student from left is Glenn Hubbard. This one room schoolhouse probably went out of use around 1938, and is no longer standing.

Happy Labor Day!

So everything went along pretty calm, until Thursday of the third week. It clouded up to rain; the thunder cracked and the lightning flashed. Afternoon recess came and we were going strictly on schedule: afternoon recess at two-thirty. I heard those wagons coming up the road and I saw these big girls: one of them was Mr. Taylor's girl and the other one was named Annie. And they giggled at each other, and shook their skirts and yonder they went through the woods to those wagon drivers.

I built up a pretty good head of steam after I pitched one inning for the ball team; I went and rang the bell. No girls appeared. The other children: "Miz Graham, didn't we have our fifteen minutes play period?"

I said, "No, we're going to have eight minutes of it the next pretty day. We have to get our lessons over with now, because it looks like it's going to rain and get the river up and wash away all of the footlogs. We have to hurry and get home before it rains. We have to have spelling."

So I marched the little children in and I had Fourth Grade spelling and we corrected the papers. No girls appeared. Fifth Grade spelling; no girls appeared. Then it was time for Seventh Grade, and they were Seventh Grade spellers, because I didn't have any Sixth Grade. Here they came in, just a struttin' and a giggling, and a shaking their skirts and a laughing and twisting.

I said, "Where have you girls been?"

"Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh."

I said, "Look a here, didn't I tell you not to leave this schoolground without permission?"

"Huh, I go where I please, when I please, and Pappy don't allow no schoolteachers to scold me."

Boy, believe you me, they'd just as well have lit that chip on my shoulder right then. I grabbed one of those dogwood switches and I went for her and I cut her shirtwaist on the bias. I don't know how I did it; but the switch did it. I was putting every bit of pep I had…now if those two girls had double-teamed on me they could have probably pitched me out of there. Maybe, I don't know. But, I whipped that girl.

Rural One-Room School, P. R. Young and pupils, Transylvania County, NC, 1903, right half of photo.

I just kept saying, "Sit down, sit down, sit down," like a needle in a broken record of a phonograph, "sit down, sit down." When I wore out one switch, the little children began running under the benches and trying to hide, because pieces of that switch were flying all over that room.

I reached for another dogwood switch, and boy, she sat down. I sat down, too. I waited until I could get my voice absolutely calm before I opened my mouth, because at St. Catherine's we had been taught, besides carrying a book on your head without dropping it, because you walked properly, that if you controlled your voice, you controlled the situation. That you could not control the situation and you should not speak until your voice was absolutely its normal self.

So I sat there about four or five minutes and got calm again. I said, "Now look a here, I told you girls not to go through the woods to meet those wagon drivers, and I'm going to stay up here these five months, and you're going to obey me, and everybody else is, that comes to this school, and when you don't, I'm going to give you a whipping, and you'd just as well know it."

I said, "Annie, come up here."

"You ain't a going to whip me like you done her!"

Annie came at me like a piledriver, sideways. She was going to knock me off my feet. I just very gracefully stepped aside and let her just about take the whole end out of that building, because she landed against it with every bit of power she had. All of the power that she had intended for me. She was a great, big, tall albino girl; one of the few albinos that I've taught: absolutely white hair, white skin, almost white eyes.

She flew at me like she was going to skin me. I just grabbed her and began to whip her and I repeated the same thing: "Sit down, sit down, sit down," because all teachers had been taught to treat them alike, and I said the same thing. Well, I didn't hit her but five licks until she sat down, and that gave me the right to quit.

I said, "All right. Now I want you girls to get ready to write your spelling, but remember that I'm boss here for five months."

So I gave out spelling, and when I dismissed that school every child cleared out every article that he’d owned that was in that building. Everything went home.

Finally, one little third grader that had charge of the home-made baseball and the home-made ball bat (that was all that we could afford then in the line of athletic equipment) was standing there knocking the ground with that ball bat. "Miss Graham," he said, "you know how to shoot. Now, I know you do. I done heard about it. Go over yonder to Mr. Kelly's where you board and get your gun. Champ Taylor will be down here directly and he'll want to cut you up with that old hawkbill knife of his, and the thing to do is to kill him."

Story continues here (go to p. 48)


Daintry Allison
(b. 1896 in Old Fort, NC)
Interviewed July 24, 1975
Southern Highlands Research Center
Louis D. Silveri Oral History Collection,
D. H. Ramsey Library Special Collections,
University of North Carolina at Asheville



Old+Fort+NC Daintry+Allison education+in+Appalachia one+room+schoolhouse appalachia appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

Part 1 of 2

Five miles out from Old Fort, up near Catawba Falls; that was my first school. No teacher ever stayed there five months. Usually, they'd stay five or six weeks.

All right. The regulations were that your dress had to come down to your ankle bone. That's what you had to wear while you taught. I made me three of those happy little items, and I wore them in time of school just like stage clothes, and then when I got out of there and went over to my boarding place, I put on my regular clothes, which barely covered my knee caps, and I dressed like I was clothed and in my right mind.

There was one man in there that tore up the school every year. People put a chip on my shoulder and they just as well put a rich pine on there when I first went in there. "Don't you talk to his children."

Now I'm not going to call that man's name. I’m going to call him Champ Taylor, because that wasn't his name. "Don't you scold Champ Taylor's children. You be good to them. Kinda pet 'em along. Maybe he'll let you stay the five months. We like you; we like this school. We don't want you to have to go away."

"Well, what does Champ Taylor do to the other teachers?"

"He comes with his old hawk bill knife and makes them run back to Old Fort, and they have to get out of here. Why, that there man last year, the last time they sent a man in this school he was the third teacher they'd sent, and he had to leave his suitcase back there in my back bedroom where he boarded here, and leave out of here and have the man that runs the river barn in Old Fort come back up here and get it; Champ Taylor had him on the go."

They said, "He had to run out of here in the dark."

Rural One-Room School, P. R. Young and pupils, Transylvania County, NC, 1903, left half of photo.

And people would say to me, "Miss Graham, when Champ Taylor gets after you, air you gonna run? Watcha gonna do? He don't let no teacher say in here no length of time."

I said, "Oh, I don't know. I'm no good at running. Maybe I'll have to wait and see what I'll do. I just don't know, but I'll meet that situation when it comes."

Right up the road above the school house there was a sawmill. The year before that, four of the bigger girls had got pregnant with illegitimate children, supposedly by those wagon drivers that were comers and goers, and they were driving wagons out of there to haul that lumber to Old Fort for sale, for shipping on the railroad.

I laid the law down the first day of school. I said, "Now, let me tell you: nobody's going off of this schoolground after you get here until time to go home. You've got to wait until three-thirty before you leave here. Nobody is going to that road to talk to these old wagon drivers, and if you do, I'll thrash you."

We thought a switch was good for everything but the toothache, then, and we didn't hesitate to use them. I had three, already dried, that my Committeemen furnished me, and put them up in the schoolroom; up in one corner. They were dogwood. So we weren't "Woodman spare that tree" people then. Things went along calmly.

Teachers had to spend one night in every home that sent them children. I wondered what I'd do when it came to going to Champ Taylor's, but I figured that if that was part of the prescription, I'd take it. So I began to visit every Tuesday night and every Thursday night, but mostly on Tuesday night, because on Monday I walked up there from Old Fort, and on Friday I walked back home those five miles after teaching all day, so visiting was confined mostly to Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

I divided it up and made my list, so that the children knew when I was coming to each home. They kept saying, "Are you going to Peachy Carson's house?" That's another name I've changed. "Teachers never did go up to Peachy Carson's. They don't stay here long enough to get up there. Peachy lives in the very last house, way up Carson's Flats.

Peachy, by the way, had a beautiful peaches complexion. One of the most lovely that I ever saw, but here hands were terrible. She hoed. She had the awfullest corns on her hands. They felt like somebody's that played golf eighteen rounds every two hours.

But Peachy could pick up a hundred pounds of cottonseed meal and just toss it into a wagon as easy as I could pick up ten pounds of sugar. Peachy's house was way back. Well, I didn't know whether I was going to get to Peachy's house or not, but I firmly resolved that I'd go there, and I left it for next to the last place. Champ Taylor's was the last place on my list. I was going there last of all.

End of part 1
Continues tomorrow


Daintry Allison
(b. 1896 in Old Fort, NC)
Interviewed July 24, 1975
Southern Highlands Research Center
Louis D. Silveri Oral History Collection,
D. H. Ramsey Library Special Collections,
University of North Carolina at Asheville



Old+Fort+NC Daintry+Allison education+in+Appalachia one+room+schoolhouse appalachia appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

It's September; time to head back to school.

Here's the Tater Valley Schoolhouse, active 1850-1950, moved from Tater Valley in Anderson County, TN to the Museum of Appalachia. Furnished in the manner of an early mountain school with wooden pews and a lectern.

Happy Labor Day!





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