Mrs. Ora Lee Barton, 104, recalled her earlier teaching days in Calhoun County on the occasion of her 4-year-old great-grandson going to school for the first time this fall.
In a taped interview by her granddaughter, Cindy Barton Robinson, Mrs. Barton said little Matthew going to school in Cordova, TN, reminded me of when I took (to school) a little girl with long blonde hair just before she was 5-years-old.
“That was me,” she said.
And it was almost 100 years ago when she recalled she enrolled at Oak Springs, just north of Derma on the Academy cutoff road.
Mrs. Barton said she attended the two-room three-teacher school until her family moved and she attended the first of several one room schools, like the ones in which she was later to teach.
“There were several two-room, three-teacher schools scattered over the county, along with lots of one-teacher schools,” she said.
She went from Oak Springs and Mineral Springs before going to Calhoun City, when it was a new school, and then on to Derma for high school.
She said she had the money to attend Blue Mountain College for one year and then began to teach to make money to go back. However, she said, she taught for several years and then got married.”
Mrs. Barton explained that the only qualification to teach and renew one’s license was passing a county examination for teachers given in Pittsboro each year.
She said she took the exam the first time when she was 16 years old and a student at Calhoun City. She failed the test but passed it the next time for a one year license, and again the next year for a three year renewal.
She started teaching at Oak Springs in 1911 when she was 18 years old. It was a one-room school with 33-34 students in primer to 8th grade. It was not graded at that time, she said, but began to be soon afterwards.
As she described the classroom, students sat on benches--four-square around the heater in the center of the room. The teacher’s desk was off to one side, she said, and students came to her desk to recite their lessons.
Mrs. Barton said she didn’t remember how she kept the little ones busy while the older students recited their lessons. But, she did recall a little girl sitting on a bench with older girls talking and distracting them from their studies. “The teacher plunked her on the head with a pencil. The little girl was me,” she said. “That’s why I remember her.”
The teacher was responsible for building the fire, she said, but many times the older boys would help. Parents of students were responsible for having firewood at the school.
Asked if the schools had indoor plumbing for bathrooms, Mrs. Barton laughed, “There were lots of woods in all directions--the boys would go one way and the girls would go the other. That would solve the whole thing.”
She also said the boys and girls did not sit on the same benches, indicating that it wasn’t something she came up with, it was--without question--just the way it was done.
Mrs. Barton recalled a spring, a bucket and a dipper at Oak Springs, where she taught in 1914-15, but said she had forgotten about the other schools. “But they had a spring or a well, I am sure.”
She also taught at Cotton Valley near Burke (Liquor Up Crossing off the Davis Farm Road) in 1910-11 and Gillespie 1913-14 before getting married and beginning to raise a family.
Children almost always walked to school from as far away as two miles, she said, but she also recalled she and her brother riding to school in Calhoun City in a buggy.
School years ran from fall to spring, she said, with recesses for cotton picking.
There was very little or no religious training as a part of the school work, she said, primarily because there was no time with all the lessons for each grade. Occasionally Bible verses were included in instruction and “we taught right and wrong.”
Enumerating the text books in a one teacher school, Mrs. Barton listed the primer, the second and third readers, Easy English and Easy Arithmetic, First and Higher Geography, History and Mississippi History, and spelling.
“On, dear me, spelling,” she said, recalling how they used to line up for speller.
She also listed English grammar, physiology--about bones-- and an 8th grade book on agriculture, before giving up. “It’s been so long I don’t recall all of them,” she said.
Town ball, or baseball, was a favorite at recess, she said, but she claimed to have not been a very good player.
Sometimes they would play games--she said she forgot the names--in which they would go around and around.
Then she remembered, “Marching around the mulberry bush, dropping handkerchief, something like that.”
“Back then,” she said, “we didn’t have to entertain them--they entertained themselves. Little girls had play houses in the woods next to the school house.
“The teacher always kept an eye on them,” she said.
She didn’t recall having to deal with any sick children, but did remember several larger boys being sent for her parents when she became ill in school.
“Mothers were always at home and probably just didn’t send children to school when they were sick.”
Discipline was a problem in only one of her schools--her first one, she said. “Those little boys were stubborn, they wouldn’t listen of me or do what I told them to do.”
“We lived through it,” she said, with the help of a switch which wasn’t “used too often.”
Mrs. Barton didn’t recall any funny or embarrassing incidents, saying, “It was all serious to me. We enjoyed each other.”
She did recall an incident at Oak Springs when the county superintendent, Oscar Rich, rode from Pittsboro to the school on his horse one day at noon as he often did to the various schools in the county.
Teachers usually lived and boarded in local homes and had a large lunch packed by the folks they lived with.
But, Mrs. Barton was living at home and all she had for lunch was a small biscuit and a smaller piece of meat.
She told the superintendent she didn’t have any lunch to share with him.
“He was nice about it,” she said.
Barton lived more than a century
Mrs. Ora Lee Barton was born July 12, 1893, to Tommy Lee and Essie Taylor Pyron. They lived in Oak Springs and Macedonia communities and she attended schools at Oak Springs, Mineral Springs, Calhoun City, Derma and Blue Mountain College.
She was married April 11, 1915, to Leo Barton of Derma, where they lived until they moved to the former Ben Hastings farm in Old Town in January 1919.
Leo Barton was known as “the hardest working man in Calhoun County,” according to his daughter, Marie Lofton of Memphis. He farmed, raised cattle and hogs, in addition to logging during the winter months, she said.
He died with cancer at age 65 in 1956, almost 40 years ago. They had four children, three of whom are still living--Mrs. Lofton, Roy Barton of Germantown and Claude Barton of Columbia, Mo. She also has five grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren
They moved to Pittsboro in 1943 after failing health forced him to give up farming. After his death she moved to Bruce until 1989, when she moved to Memphis.
“Her heart is still in Calhoun County,” Mrs. Lofton said. “She says her faith in God, plus clean living and hard work, is what has kept her going 104 years. She is quite a lady.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was first published in November of 1997.