As I have written earlier, my Aunt Pearl, as well as my mother Oma, wrote about growing up on Chestnut Mountain. Schools today don’t wait until the Tuesday after Labor Day to begin school. Around the United States, school doors open as early as the first week in August.
Even as the Bragg children attended the one-room school, on days when they had to be inside, Mom (Oma) would take Coleman and Erma to the kitchen to play school
Below is a story in Pearl’s words describing the Bragg children’s days during the 1919-1920 school year (over 100 years ago).
Grandaddy went down to the school board and threatened to sue if they didn’t get a teacher at the one-room school on top of Chestnut Mountain. His four oldest children were girls. What does a farmer do with girls? He gets them an education. Irene (Bragg Grimmett) was twelve and Pearl (Laska Chamberlin) ten when the Chestnut Mountain School was built over a mile from the house. Pauline (Bragg Roth)was eight, and Oma (Bragg O’Bryan) was six. It was made of weather-beaten, used lumber. There were several discarded desks (each seating two or three students) sent from another school, a wood-burning stove, and a water bucket and a dipper.
School opening was delayed a second time because the building was not completed, and the first year ended before outdoor toilets, called privies, were built. The first teacher was Miss Grace. Pearl observed that Miss Grace spent more time flirting with the oldest boys, seventeen and eighteen, close to her age!
(A sidebar: my granddaughter and I visited the school when she was about four or five. I showed her the outhouse and asked, “Kate, do you know what this is?” With an exasperated sigh, she looked at me with her “Don’t you know” look and replied, “Grandma, it’s a Port-A-Potty!” I was quickly put in my place!)
Now, continuing with Pearl’s story: On the first day, Pearl asked about the outhouse. Miss Grace replied that it hadn’t been built yet. Fortunately, there was a woodland with towering chestnut trees near the school grounds. Recess found all of the students heading for the woods, boys to the north and girls to the south. Before spring, it took careful planning to find a secluded spot and avoid stepping on the smelly mess made by another student. Some of the smaller children heeded nature’s call by going behind the school building. “Thick as turds behind a country schoolhouse,” was a common expression.
During that first week, Charlie Rhodes, a school official, visited. He asked Pearl how old she was, and she replied, “I’m ten and in the first grade.”
Mr. Rhodes replied, “Hum-m-m, little girl if you had started when you were six, you would be in high school in four years.” That got Pearl thinking about a poem her Poppa had read to her many times:
“When I was a beggarly boy,
And lived in the cellar damp,
I had not a friend or toy,
But I had Aladdin’s Lamp.”
Pearl worked hard to complete eighth grade in four years, and she did.
Miss Grace didn’t last very long. The next teacher didn’t last either. When he gave the test to determine the girls’ grade levels, Pearl had been sick for two weeks. When she got her report card that showed she had flunked, she was so angry that she tore it into little pieces and threw it down a crawfish hole!
The next teacher was Reed Copeland from Ohio. He lied about his age–saying he was 17 (not the 16 he really was) so he could get the teaching job. On the first day, Mr. Copeland asked what grades they were in. Irene said fourth. Pearl also said she was in the fourth grade. By two weeks before her fourteenth birthday, Pearl passed the exam and was the first from the mountain to complete the eighth grade. All four girls, Irene, Pearl, Pauline, and Oma became teachers. And it all began on Chestnut Mountain!
My mother, Oma Bragg O’Bryan, was a poet and an artist. She wrote this poem:
THE ONE-ROOM SCHOOL
The one-room school
Most a thing of the past,
There it stands all alone
Not long can it last.
With its desks, all broken
The seats all gone
The boards that were painted
Have now passed on
The hooks on the wall
Where our coats once hung,
Are rusted and ruined
They can’t last long.
The pot-bellied stove
The coal bucket, too,
Are no longer present
In the school, I once knew.
The ivy is a climbing
Over the schoolhouse eaves,
With tendrils soft and tender
Hear the fluttering of the leaves.
The windows all around
With broken panes you see,
The bats fly in and out
Frantically dancing with glee.
The one-room school
Most a thing of the past
There it stands all alone
How long can it last?
“The One-Room School,” WHERE I LONG TO GO, O’Bryan, Oma Bragg, Vantage Press, 1974.
Personal Stories, Chamberlin, Pearl Bragg Laska (1909-2012)
