OLD SCHOOL DAYS RELIVED IN BANKS COUNTY
Every year on the first Tuesday in August segregation is legal in a school about five miles from here and about three miles off highway 98.
That's the day the students who attended the last one-room Negro school building in Banks County have their reunion.
Although the former students probably don't need it in August, the old wooden heater still stands in the Shiloh School. The former students can sit on the three homemade benches and face the homemade desk the teacher and Principal, Eva Martin, occupied for at least 20 years.
Ms. Martin died seven years ago , so the former students can't sit around and reminisce with the teacher anymore, but they can talk about the old days when they went to school in July and August, got out in September and October to pick cotton and went back to school in November until the end of March, when they were out again to hoe the cotton.
The school was built in 1935, says Mrs. Gladys Faulkner of Maysville, who was there for the reunion this August. Another building that stood on the same spot either burned or was torn down.
Some 30 children , age six through sixteen, all went to school together in the one room school until 1949 or 1950, when the school systems were consolidated, and the children went to Homer.
The students have already held their reunion this year. If the plans for reunions continue, the old building should be standing there next year waiting, and probably the old worn out brush broom will be leaning near the door.
story ran in The Times date is unknown.
(date cut off, clip in hanging file, Hall County Library)
Written by Jackie Sosby and Brenda Thomas
Copyright 2003 Vicky Chambers