HISTORICAL SKETCHES

 
 
      

CANE CREEK BAPTIST CHURCH                                                                           

 

Number 15: April 2006   www.canecreek.org         6901 Orange Grove Road., Hillsborough, NC 27278

THE OLD ONE ROOM SCHOOL HOUSE

 

In Sketch 12, James Cheek noted that in his childhood, farmers did not fertilize nor plant cover crops. They just “planted the same crop until the land was worn out.” Then the field would be abandoned and it would grow up in broom straw, scrub pines and cedars. Our ancestors found that one good use for these worn out fields was as a place to build a neighborhood school. This was done in the early 19th century before North Carolina established a public school system. Since their inception early in our history, these schools have been referred to as "old-field schools." Local citizens built the schools and paid the teacher's salary. In 1840, the first tax-supported schools were established with each school getting $20 from a local school tax and $40 from the state. By the Civil War, North Carolina had one of the nation's better school systems. But the schools went down hill during the war and reconstruction. Things were in a sorry state by the time James Cheek first went to school about 1880. He gives us a picture of school life in Footprints of a Human Life. You may recall from Sketch 10 that Anderson P. Cates was a teacher at Chinquapin Rough in the Toms Creek District. By coincidence, this is the school that James Cheek attended. Here is what Cheek said about his old school days.

 

“The school we attended was called Chinquapin Rough, located in the Toms Creek District...

The schoolhouse sat in an opening on the ridge the size of a small baseball diamond. The building was made of logs, about twenty by twenty feet square, with rafters of round pine poles and a roof of what we called clapboards, about three feet long, riven with a fro. The west window was an opening about ten feet long and eighteen inches high, covered with a hinged board. Then on the north and the east side there were two small sash windows with panes. The floor was made of wide undressed boards, and the seats of slabs from the sawmill, showing plain marks of the saw teeth on their surface. We boys had worn them slick with our sliding back and forth to whisper or engage in mischief. The girls had their fun too. One day, Susie Nicks threw a gravel and hit Mr. A. P. Cates, the teacher, right on top of the head. He tried hard to find out who threw it, but Susie looked to be the most innocent child in the room and no one told on her.

 

"There was a fireplace with an extremely large hearth, about four feet by seven, made of rough stones, which would hold a five-foot log. We would fill the fireplace half way up to the arch of the chimney, and get the fire to roaring and it would counteract the cold air which blew in through the cracks of the floor and walls.

 

"For a writing desk, we had a table twelve feet long made with a board in the center twelve or fourteen inches wide for the ink, then on each side of this was a board of the same size, slanted a little, where we put our copy books and did our best to write like the copy before us. There was room for about sixteen of us to write at a time, eight on each side.

 

"In my early school years, we were not graded, for at that time, the North Carolina school system was among the poorest. However, after I had been away for a number of years, on going back, I saw that my native state was among the most progressive in schools, roads, and industry, of any through which we passed going from the west coast to the east. But at that time, the school at Chinquapin Rough enrolled about sixty pupils and one teacher handled them all.

 

"At that time we were using Webster’s Spelling Book, Holmes’ reader, and Sanford’s arithmetic. About the last thing some days before going home, we would all line up and do our best to spell each other down. Sometimes an unspelled word would go nearly to the foot of the line, and then one of us would be lucky enough to spell it. We usually showed that we felt our importance as we passed perhaps a dozen children and took out place near the head where the word was first given out.”

 

In those days, not much schooling was required of children. Manley Snipes (Charles' uncle, who ran the store just south of the church), who would have attended public schools around 1900, once told me that he had only three years of schooling, each year of schooling lasting about three months. It was rare for a rural child to go on to high school. Cordelia Cox in her 1925 Master's Thesis on Orange County schools quoted a farmer as explaining why his daughter dropped out of school: "She's had enough education. Girls do not need education to be good wives and the trouble with the country now is that too much is being spent on education."

 

In the early 20th century, legislatures all across the country began to pass compulsory attendance laws and to otherwise strengthen public education. A survey of Orange County’s 78 (50 white and 28 black) one-room schools was carried out in 1919. Roads in those days were so bad that it was almost impossible for the Orange County School Superintendent to visit each one in any given year. The report stated that:

 

"In the main, the quality of the teaching is poor. Teachers were formal, bookish, listless, vague, careless, confined to the text in their teaching, ... and a great many were merely going through the motions. Less than 80% of the school age children were actually enrolled and of these, only about 70% were in attendance on any given day. A business run on such a basis is bound to turn out a crude, unfinished, inferior product" (UNC Record #166, 1919). Reports like these were the opening shots in the move toward school consolidation.

 

The brick schoolhouses at White Cross and at Orange Grove were built about 1924. Orange Grove School was located where the community building now stands. This is a picture, I think, of the school just after it was built. During the Second World War, the school caught fire one night and burned to the ground. The church bought the five-acre tract from the School Board in 1947 and the community building was built in the early 1950s.

                                                                                                                        Ed Johnson