[Granville-Hough] 18 Aug 2009 - Aftermath of Oak Hill School

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Aftermath of Oak Hill School

Why did you go to Magee High School? I, Granville Hough, have been asked 
this simple question to which I can only give a complicated answer. It 
gets back to community pride in the Oak Hill School. My parents never 
made any secret that they did not feel comfortable about our attendance 
at Mize. We did not shop there, but rather in Magee. Our nearest 
relatives were in Magee. Many of the prominent families in Magee had 
attended Oak Hill School. To the extent we had social life, it was more 
toward Magee than toward Mize. Magee was simply our town, though we 
lived physically in Smith County.

When, in the summer of 1937, I suggested to my mother that I wanted to 
go to high school in Magee, she did not object; she simply asked how I 
would do it. I said I would walk the 1 and ¼ plus mile through the woods 
and fields from my home to Carl Yelverton’s house in Simpson County and 
catch the Sharon school bus and go to Magee. There was a kind of 
precedent in that Draughn Magee, a ward of Joe Ware, had walked from the 
Ware home on the county line over to our home, three miles by road, to 
get the bus in order to attend Smith County Agricultural High School. He 
was later Sheriff of Simpson County.

So without much ado, I simply showed up in Magee, enrolled, and settled 
in. I think my mother has spoken to Uncle Ehrman McAlpin, who was on the 
Magee School Board, who in turn spoke to his brother, Newell McAlpin, 
the Smith County School Superintendent. I think some discreet 
arrangements must have been made about tuition and taxes. I paid the 
Sharon bus driver, Clear Yelverton, five cents for each day I rode the 
bus, $1.00 per month. The first year went all right. The second year, 
the Sharon district only let me ride the first day. What would I do? I 
noted that the Dixie district bus came to the Ware Cut to the last home 
registered in Dixie. I spoke to Curtis Cockerell, the driver, and he 
agreed to let me ride at the same rate of $1.00 per month. So for the 
second year, I walked the three miles to catch the Dixie bus. At Dixie, 
we transferred to the bus taking the high school students to Magee. My 
daily route was 12 miles to school, then 12 miles home. The third year 
we had joined households with Granpa Jim Richardson, so I caught the 
Dixie Bus at Saratoga Road, frequently waving to my friends on the 
Sharon Bus as I walked the same road it used. By the fourth year, I had 
established a reputation and the Sharon district invited me to ride its 
bus, which I did.

Following my graduation as Valedictorian of the Class of 1941, my 
brothers and several other families made a county arrangment to go to 
Magee. All were from the old Oak Hill School. This lasted for a 
generation, until state laws on desegregation forced all students in 
Mississippi to go to schools within their own county boundaries.
Teen-age obstinacy can have unusual consequences. I started the trend, 
but it got wiped out 40 years later by larger events.