Back to School
The Dog Days of August are here, and that means that it’s time to get ready to head back to school. Throngs of parents and students (reluctantly) flock to local shopping venues searching for just the right clothes, pens, pencils, paper, notebooks, backpacks, lunch bags, calculators, dictionaries, calendars, etc. It is daunting at the variety in the marketplace and the number of special needs for today’s classes.
 Shopping for school clothes was a bit different in 1902. Here is an invoice for School Boy Jeans. Girls probably had their clothes made by their mother. |
The Mast Store has been providing school supplies for over a century and is well stocked with backpacks to handle most any homework load, great styles of boots and shoes to make and impression on the first day back, and clothes and jackets for later in the fall when it gets just a bit nippy to wear your summer shorts.
Has preparing for school always been this frantic? The lists this long? Instead of discussing all the things needed for school today, let’s look back at how “back to school” was handled in the late 1800s and early 1900s. By looking back in Mast Store’s old invoices, you’ll find that some of those “lists” have always been around.
First, imagine that there was no bus to pick you up and your parents didn’t make a special trip to take drop you off at the front door of the school house. Sometimes it really was a trek of five or six miles one way to get to school. Students would walk much of the way carrying their shoes so they wouldn’t be dirty when they got to the school house, plus it kept them from wearing out so fast. Or if the weather was really bad, the family wagon might be hitched up to bring you to school. Even with that, the floors would become so dusty by the end of the day that they had to be wet down and swept.
In the late 1800s, the school term was only about three months, and absenteeism was rampant. Children had to help harvest the crops, assist with hog killing, or watch younger siblings while mother did the washing. Many students chalk and slates instead of pencil and paper and desks were homemade or simple split log benches. Teacher pay in the 1880s was $17 per month, but that did not include the meals that may be taken at many a pupil’s home where the teacher was held with the same regard as a preacher.
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Lunch (or dinner as it was referred to) was carried to school in a pail and would consist of biscuits, jelly or applebutter, butter and brown sugar, eggs, and ham. Milk and cornbread carried to school in a jar was also a favorite! After lunch, the boys and girls had play time - always playing separately.
Heat in the school came from a centrally located wood stove. Children and parents provided the wood and/or coal to keep the stove going.
Even though this education seems rudimentary, there were finer points taught. The girls were given the
opportunity to learn etiquette, sewing, hygiene, embroidery, etc. And each school had some music education that focused on patriotic and religious themes.
 Textbooks came from several different suppliers, too. |
In the period between 1900 and 1920 schools provided the following: homemade desks, a bucket and dipper, a shovel, a broom, a blackboard, chalk, and erasers. Parents had to furnish all textbooks, paper, pencils, and pens. At the Mast Store, invoices show that the schools near Valle Crucis used several publications from GINN, American Book Company, University Publishing, and the North Carolina School Book Depository. Children would scour the mountainsides looking for galax, ginseng, wild cherry bark, sassafras, and clover blossoms that they could barter at the local general store for their textbooks. Often, all the needed books could not be purchased by one family, so students would study together.
Pencil and paper were “luxury” items that were not to be wasted. One pencil might be cut in
 The Blue Black Speller is the spelling textbook most often referred to. The invoices tell us that the Harrington Comprehensive Speller was used in the Valle Crucis area. |
half to make two, and a small notch whittled in the top to allow a string to be attached so the student could wear it around his neck. There were no pencil sharpeners, so each student - boys and girls - carried a small pen knife to whittle down a point.
In 1907, the Valle Crucis Academy was built. It was a public school offering three classrooms and was proclaimed by the local newspaper, the Watauga Democrat, to be the finest in the county. It was also the only high school in the county at that time. It offered an eighth grade. Students would come from other districts to take one more year of instruction.
School days were long stretching from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. and discipline was strict. Some forms of punishment included standing on tip toes with your nose in one spot on the board or keeping your arms outstretched and fingers placed in certain marks. Of course, another popular form of punishment was the dunce stool.
The first buses began appearing in the late 1920s. These were no more than trucks adapted for use as buses by putting benches around the sides of the bed. One “bus” had galvanized sides and a roof with the only opening being the door at the back where students climbed in. Outfitted to hold 16 passengers, more than that piled in and students took turns sitting on each others laps.
 Holmes First Reader and later volumes were purchased from University Publishing Co. |
The roads these first buses traveled were not the best - especially when the rains came. Then the students would find themselves pushing the bus up hills and with the snows, down hills, too.
In the 1940s, schools began to take on the form that many of us are familiar with today. Grade 12 was added to high school; schools provide all textbooks; buses are more like the yellow vehicles we see on the roads now; the school year was extended to 180 days; boys and girls were no longer kept separate.
In Watauga County, those who volunteered their time to work for education had the good fortune to be associated with the Dougherty brothers - B. B. and D. D. - who were the founders of Appalachian State University. When they opened the doors of Watauga Academy in 1899, their goal was to make education accessible to mountain children. Through their foresight and hard work, they were able to push many education-oriented laws through the North Carolina legislature and penned much of the legislation in their home which was located on the ASU campus.
They also formed a strong bond between the university and the local school system. The elementary school in Boone was called a “demonstration” school, where college students could observe classes and practice what they had been taught in their own classrooms.
Our education system has changed much since those first years after the Civil War when states legislated that every youngster should get some sort of an education.
Theories have changed; courses have changed; schools have changed. But one thing remains constant, the need for a well-rounded education that exposes the student to different ideas and experiences in order for them to be a contributor to society.
**Information for this article was gleaned from a report prepared by the Bicentennial Committee in Watauga County called Development of Public Education in Watauga County, North Carolina, John Preston Arthur's book A History of Watauga County, and personal experience and conversations. I hope you enjoy it.
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