[Granville-Hough] 12 Aug 2009 - Community Schools

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

The Era of Community Schools. 

At the end of the Civil War, there seem to 
have been no public schools in Sullivan’s Hollow, particularly none in 
the piney woods areas. For the few families fortunate enough to have 
funds, they could hire tutors for their children. It is not exactly 
clear how the people of that generation learned to read and write. In 
fact, most did not. Census records show that my grandmother, Martha 
Lenora (Miller) (Keyes) Hough, growing up near the Tom Sullivan family, 
could read, but not write. My father thought he had gotten to about the 
third grade by going to neighborhood schools on upper Cohay where 
several families would get together and hire a teacher for about three 
months each year to teach children their letters. Then about 1900, with 
the flow of money from timber sales, neighborhoods began to develop 
community schools. These flourished in the 1900-1910 era, and people 
began to learn more about the outer world. The railroad across the 
southern part of the county was a really modern outlet which allowed 
teachers from the outside world to come in and for students to go out. 
Soon, more progressive communities even installed community telephone 
systems. The community schools soon learned about grading, which meant 
separating children into grades at each level of learning, all the way 
up to the 8th grade. There was much opposition to the concept of grading 
because it did not allow each student to go as fast or as slow as they 
liked. My mother, Elizabeth Richardson, and several of her siblings, 
finished the 8th grade at Oak Hill School, then went to the County Seat 
at Raleigh and passed the examination to become teachers. She and her 
brother, Uncle Martin Richardson, then went to Newton County and taught 
all the grades in a two teacher school there.