On the property bordering my grandparent’s farm to the south stood a schoolhouse. It was called the Clay Hill school and it served the children in the rural Madry community from about 1890 until all the country schools of the area were consolidated with the school systems of Aurora and Jenkins around 1959.
As a child Clay Hill was a mysterious and enticing place. In the 1970s most of the desks still remained as well as the chalkboards, a rusty teeter-totter and two outhouses. An abandoned Confederate cemetery stood just across the old school lane in a clump of trees. My sister and I used to try to frighten each other with stories of ghostly apparitions rising from the forgotten graves to devour trespassing children after dark.
My grandmother Mary Jane Haddock was renowned for her skills in the kitchen and for many years was the school’s cook. She received an allotment from the state every month and purchased enough food to feed the children. Some of the kids would not have enough money to pay for their lunches but she would always feed them anyway. In those days folks would always repay that debt. My mother who studied elementary education at Southwest Missouri State was a substitute teacher there in the late 1950’s. Both of her siblings attended the school for a time.
My sister Laura Hazelwood got interested in the cemetery while studying the civil war battles of Missouri while she attended Missouri Southern in Joplin and it rekindled my interest in the school. By this time in the late 1980s the building was in a sorry state. There had been an aborted renovation attempt at some point, then it was used to store hay. After I was married in 1996 I took my wife back there to see the school and time had decayed it even further. The roof was sagging, someone had made off with the bell. I never thought to photograph it until the owner of the property had already decided to raze the structure.
I studied on the loss of that old building and what that place had meant for generations of people who had attended there. I knew there were other old schools in the area. Elsey School had been demolished while I was in high school. Leann School in Jenkins stood close enough to Highway 39 to see when I passed. I started researching some of the schools online and discovered David Burton’s survey of Greene County rural schools. His work was an inspiration. Armed with a Nikon D5100 I barely knew how to use I decided to document as many schools as I could find in the rural Ozarks.
I started with the low-hanging fruit in my own neighborhood of Forsyth, Missouri in Taney County. I researched RootsWeb, the White River Historical Society, spoke to older citizens and learned a lot. I discovered that the Forsyth High School had posted some oral histories to YouTube about area schools as described by the elderly former students. I downloaded GPS coordinates, took a lot of wrong turns and saw a lot of the backwoods of Southwest Missouri that a lot of people don’t get to see. Finding an old school became like winning a jackpot! My searches for rural schools became an almost weekly event, one that I anticipated all week long.
I shot this one in Lawrence County
I tried to take an artistic view of the schools I photographed rather than a strict documentary format. I often shoot up to 150 frames from multiple angles and try to accentuate backgrounds and clouds or minute interior details. From those shots I whittle each school down to a few “special” shots and give them a cursory editing in iPhoto or Nikon ViewNX. Before I knew it I had about 30 good school shots from 6 counties in Missouri and 1 in Arkansas. I learned more about the early rural school system than I ever thought I’d know and what do you know? I can use that camera now.
Many of my photographs can be seen on my Pinterest board “One-Room Schoolhouses of the Ozarks” at this link: http://www.pinterest.com/mondorob/one-room-shoolhouses-of-the-ozarks/ and others on my Flickr photo stream here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mondorob/
Have an old schoolhouse that you know about in your neighborhood that you don’t see in these photos? Respond to this blogpost with directions and I’ll add it to the collection. It feels good to document some Missouri history that may otherwise be forgotten.
toadstrangler 