Harrison School - Madison County, GA Submitted by Mary Love Berryman 25 Apr 2003 Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm *********************************************************************** All documents placed in the USGenWeb Archives remain the property of the contributors, who retain publication rights in accordance with US Copyright Laws and Regulations. In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, these documents may be used by anyone for their personal research. They may be used by non-commercial entities so long as all notices and submitter information is included. These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit. Any other use, including copying files to other sites, requires permission from the contributors PRIOR to uploading to the other sites. The submitter has given permission to the USGenWeb Archives to store the file permanently for free access. *********************************************************************** Madison County Journal, 19 March 2003 Resident remembers long ago days at Harrison School Nellie Sue Parham King remembers her school days at Harrison School in northern Madison County during the 1920s and 30s very well. “Those were some hard times then,” she said of going to school just before and during the Great Depression. “But I have a lot of good memories of those times too.” King still lives in the same community she was born in 84 years ago. Harrison was just one of a number of small community schools that dotted the countryside in those days, providing a rural education to children who couldn’t travel far from home to get it. The first Harrison School burned in 1923, leaving King to begin school in the first of two houses used for the purpose before classes were moved to nearby Bethel Congregational Holiness Church. “I got a late start; I didn’t start until age 7 because I was considered ‘sickly,’” she remembered. In fact she remembers a moment of mischief before she started to school when she and a young nephew threw rocks at the home where school was being held on their way to fetch water from a nearby spring. “We were scared we would get caught so we went through the woods to avoid going back by the school,” she said, laughing. But once she did get to enroll at Harrison she hardly ever missed a day of walking the one mile each way to school with her older sister and younger brother. In 1929 a second building was constructed for a school house, which still stands along Hwy. 281, (also known as Wildcat Bridge Road) in northern Madison County. This last school consisted of five classrooms and a lunchroom. “They (school leaders) bought an A-Model truck and made it into a school bus. Penick Jordan was the bus driver,” King remembers. “It had curtains to cover the windows on the sides until the boys on the bus made windmills and tore the curtains off by sticking them out into the wind as we went down the road.” “We had to buy our books back then, I remember once my father hunted and hunted for a book I needed and finally bought one second-hand for three dollars...That was a lot in those days,” she said. King made it there through the ninth grade - the highest grade at Harrison. Further education would have required her to travel several miles more to Royston, not an easy undertaking in those days when there were “mighty few cars.” Instead she followed the custom of the day, marrying at 16 and beginning a family. She and her husband worked a farm in the community and reared two boys. After a while she went to work at a sewing plant in Bowman, where she held a job for 37 years. “I made 40 cents an hour when I started and $3.50 an hour when I retired,” she said. “Those were some different times then,” she said. Like most other country school houses, Harrison closed its doors in the mid 1950s when schools were consolidated by the state.