Volume 3, Number 7 - Spring 1969
The Bald Knob School
I often see the Bald Knob School mentioned in the Cedar Creek news and will say that I went to this school when it was first built sixty some years ago if the same building is still standing today. The Bald Knob School I remember the best is the old one that stood some half mile closer to Cedar Creek south of Uncle Charlie Persinger's place.
His rail fence was not far from the back of the school. Some of the pupils came one or two miles most of them barefoot in the Summer time except the older ones.
It was in the Spring of 1897 that my sister, Maggie and I first went to this old school.
We had just moved to the hills from Illinois. When it was built I never learned but the weather boards on the outside were dark with age as no paint had ever touched it inside or out with the exception of the blackboard. It was of wood painted black.
The pupils sat on long wooden benches which ran from the aisle to the wall. The girls on the left side of the room, the boys on the right.
On the girls side near the rostrum on which stood the teacher's desk and chair was a large box stove.
At the back end of the room near the door was a bracket on which stood a bucket of drinking water with its tin dipper. During warm weather this bucket required filling quite often and the teacher would detail two of us boys to fill it at the spring. This we were always willing to do. It gave us a chance to get away from our studies and loaf a bit.
The pupils as well as the teacher carried their lunches in an assortment of tin pails. There were no thermos bottles of hot or cold drinks those days, but there was the water bucket and the boys willing to keep it filled.
In the Winter, pupils would eat their lunch on the benches where they sat, but in warm weather would often hunt up a shade tree.
In our lunch pails would be biscuits or corn bread with fried bacon or eggs. Sometimes even a piece of fried chicken. There would be a cup of fruit or of sorghum or a couple of tomatoes with a lump of salt wrapped in a piece of paper. In Winter, would often have dried peach pie.
This backwoods school was primitive in many ways but there was a simple rule that solved this problem, during recess and noon hour the boys could wander into the woods in one direction, the girls in the opposite direction.
It was our first day at school. I was nine and my sister twelve years old. Elsie Russell was our teacher. She later married Walter Coble. After we had eaten our noon lunch, a game of "Aunty Over" was played. One of the boys had a homemade ball which would be thrown over the house top.
The pupils were divided into two sides and as near as I can remember, the game which was new to me if someone caught the ball each party would run to the opposite side of the building.
The one who had caught the ball would try and touch as many of the other party with it as he could who then belonged to his side.
I had joined in the game and all went well until racing around the back of the school house I collided head-on with a lanky girl who was coming full speed from the opposite side.
My forehead caught her square on the nose which she started rubbing with remark "you damn Dutchman, you nearly broke my nose."
I could not deny these facts so said nothing but my hard Dutch head had stood the schock well.
There were games played with singing in them, such as Farmer in the Dell and Happy as the Miller Boy.
There was no singing in class as there had been in Illinois, but during noon hour some of the older pupils would sometimes sing a hymn out of the books used in Sunday meeting. The school was never locked and I do not think that homes were.
Near the school were a number of mounds which were a common sight. Who had built them and why, no one seemed to know and cared less. They were just mounds, but to the people who had built them now long gone and forgotten it must have taken a
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considerable amount of labor to bring all this earth together.
They may have been used as burial mounds. One not far from the school seemed to have been used for this purpose but by an early settler or during the War. While playing with a couple of other boys on this mound which was covered with buck brush and young cedars I saw a pit in the top about three by six feet. I asked one of the boys why it had been dug and he replied, "I heard that money had been buried there."
Hoping some stray coins might have been overlooked, I hunted around in it. What I found was some pieces of rotted boards that had once been painted black and had lain there for years, a couple of old fashioned square wrought-iron nails still in them. This may have been part of a treasure chest, but more likely, a coffin.
Some of those who taught at the old Bald Knob were Elsie Russell, Mr. Will John son of Kissee Mills, Mrs. Leathers, Tolitha Whelchel, and Dell Whelchel. These all taught at the old school.
I will name some of the pupils as I remember them. Some of them may still be living in the hills. Others like myself have long left the country and some are no longer living. There were the Persingers, Mary, Sarah, Lizzie, Frank, Charlie and Marty, Neva, Archie and Jessie Coulter, Martha, Annie and John Merdith, Smith Hatfield, Owen Blackwell, Ernie Beeler, Celia Dunn, Lemmie and Millie Collins, Mary, Mandy and Charlie May, Billie Jones, Etta and Floyd Barber, Cora and Dora Stewart, Clarence, Mamie and Johnny Muller, Earnie, Eddy and Millard Stallcup, Henry, Lilly Floyd and Flora Trammel, Jim, Alpha, Bertie, Della and Sam Awbery, Clint and Lonnie O'Neil, Bessie, George and Clint Hensley, Marion Bohanon, May and Maude Snyder.
There were no doubt others that I have missed, but I am sure that those that are still living wherever they may be, somtimes think back to the old school days and the old school house in the woods where the three R's were taught.
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