As the last school bells ring for the year, we continue to look back at those schools which closed years ago in the Fork, the Knox County lands between the French Broad and Holston Rivers. Beginning in the 1870s, practically every little community in the Fork had a school within walking distance. However, over time, population growth and improved transportation caused consolidation and the expansion of some schools, while others entirely disappeared from the maps.
Walnut Hill supports the location of Carter High, 1914
Often-forgotten schools of the Fork include Summit Hill, which was northeast of Stephenson’s Quarry near Holston River Road, Armstrong on Stony Point in Hightop, Sand Branch on the western end of Thorn Grove, Armstrong’s at Hightop and Walnut Hill near Molly Bright Road. Walnut Hill served families such as Sherrod, Burroughs, French, McPherson, Burris, Graves and others in the community on Pleasant Hill Road. R.L. Walker was principal there in 1908, and the school was still operating into the 1930s.
Another early school was Cedar Ridge, which was in the northeastern section of the Fork near Strawberry Plains. Robert Mehaffy was principal there in 1908. Mary A. Sensabaugh had been one of its teachers in the late 1800s, and she shared in a 1939 interview at age 90 that as a teacher she had been paid $35 a month and had 80 students. She had been trained at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where she was present when General William T. Sherman came through during the Civil War in his “March to the Sea.”
1890s Fork native Luther Johnson recalled in his memoirs that at the corner of Wooddale Road and Strawberry Plains Pike, the bell tower at Wooddale Academy called school into session the first week of August, and students attended as they were able between the demands of farm work. Some boys attended only a few full weeks of school before the winter break. As a result, piecing together an education took much longer, and some students continued to come after they were grown. The school yard was well shaded by large oaks and surrounded by a white plank fence. At recess, the students walked the fence rails, see-sawed on a long plank placed on a middle fence rail, built dams in the nearby spring, caught tadpoles and frogs, climbed hills, slid down banks and got into the neighboring orchard (which was against the rules).
Wooddale School, 1949
Luther wrote, “The ceiling had been painted a sky blue. The blackboards were clean and shiny. The double seats with hardened brown paint accommodated four students to the set placed along together with narrow aisles between the rows. There was a partition with a United States map on it just behind the platform of the teacher, but on each side of the partition there were openings, one for the boys and the other for the girls, and behind these large doorways were shelves on the wall of the building where dinner baskets were set and winter clothes were hung. There was a desk for the teacher and a big wood stove immediately in front of the platform.” On the east wall hung a large chart which was used in teaching the equivalent of kindergarten. Luther’s uncle Joseph Newman was an early Wooddale teacher.
The Sunnyview community’s first school was called Chestnut Hollow but was renamed as Sunnyview when a second structure of two rooms was built. It was then replaced by the four-room brick building at Ruggles Ferry Pike (formerly a dirt road called Armstrong Ferry but changed when an Armstrong daughter married a Ruggles who continued to operate the ferry) and what is now Asheville Highway. The newer school was later completed by Anderson and Watson Construction in the mid 1960s on Bagwell Lane with electric heat. However, it did not include a fallout shelter as had been considered because of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I attended the new school for eight years after it opened and well remember the few years it was part of an experimental program where we were tested and divided into “phases” instead of grades. That’s just one more element of education that’s been forgotten in the Fork, but we’ll note additional old schools next week.
Jan Loveday Dickens is an educator, historian, and author of Forgotten in the Fork, a book about the Knox County lands between the French Broad and Holston Rivers, obtainable by emailing ForgottenInTheFork@gmail.com.
