Slate Mountain, Virginia

Virginia Ruth Lancaster

 

Slate Mountain. I do not know how it got its name. It is a small settlement at the top of Adney’s Gap near the Meadows of Dan. The Blue Ridge Parkway runs about a mile away and Mabry’s Mill, one of the most photographic stops along the Parkway, is in the neighborhood.

Slate Mountain is a vivid memory for me. After I graduate from Pikeville College, I returned home and applied to the Floyd County Board of Education for a teaching job. I was assigned to one of the last one-room schoolhouses in Virginia. The wind blew the building down the year after I taught there.

My brother, Albert, drove me the 30 miles from Floyd Courthouse. I don’t remember being nervous or frightened. Albert deposited me at the local store, a typical country store with salt, molasses, starch, and a shelf of dress materials and what nots.

The community consisted of only three families: the Edwards, the Belchers, and the Underwood’s. These families never intermarried with the other families in the community, but all had close ties with the massive Slate Mountain Presbyterian Church. The church contrasted starkly with the rickety grey schoolhouse in its back yard.

The Underwood family consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Underwood and a bachelor son who always dated the one-room schoolteacher. His name was Frank, and I was duly invited to drive to Stuart, Virginia, most Saturday nights for a movie. Frank owned the local garage; he was a tall, somber man.

Once after two or three movie dates, he did put his arm across my shoulder, but quickly removed it. I did not offer encouragement. He took me home when school was over that year. He proposed, and I politely declined. I wondered about him and when I visited the community 15 years later, I found Frank had married the schoolteacher whose place I had taken. Sadly, he had died. He was a shy, kind, different man.

Mr. and Mrs. Edwards were the proprietors of the store and being half a mile from the grey one-room Slate Mt. School. They boarded the schoolteacher. Mrs. Edwards was a kind soul and Mr. Edwards a small man that left most things to his wife. Lilly, their daughter, and her small son lived in a house within sight.

I was paid 84 dollars a month for one year of teaching. My room and board cost me 12.00 a month which included breakfast and a packed lunch, and supper. To get to my room in the garret, I had to pass through the boy’s room, two strange creatures that seldom spoke. I never remember feeling strange or nervous about going through the boy’s room to get to my own. They were really grown men and one was not quite right.

The first morning of school I took my lunch bag and walked past Lilly’s house to the schoolhouse. The school stood on a hill, a ship gray building with two windows. To get in, one climbed 7 rickety steps. Inside were rows of desks on the left and right. Each would seat two students. The wood burning stove stood in the middle of the room. A blackboard faced the heavy door. That was It, except for the wood box behind the left row of seats. This is where the three lower grades sat.

My job was to have the schoolhouse warm by the time the students got there at 9:00 A.M and start the pot of pinto beans for our lunch. Most of my students arrived early. They shuffled in meekly and took their seats with out a word. I said, cheerfully, “Good morning, children. They replied, “Good Morning, Miss Lancaster”.

 I was 19, my oldest student was a 7^th grader who was 17. There was one 7^th grade girl who was 14. She became my right hand. There were 3 children in the 3^rd grade, my biggest class. Several in scattered in 4^th 5^th and 6^thgrades. A daunting task. There was one overgrown boy in Primer. I never managed to get him past Run, Spot, Run! He was retarded.

At all my attempts to start conversation and see what these students were about, I received whispered replies and dropped heads.  Finally, I asked, cheerfully again,” why do you whisper”? My Seventh-grade right hand girl said, “Our previous teacher made us whisper. “Well, I replied, “this teacher will permit you to talk in a natural voice, so speak up”.

Things picked up. I distributed books, Blue Horse notebooks and pencils and we were on our way to one of the most exciting years of my career.

How do you teach a one room school with students at all levels? The older 7^th grade students heard the reading lessons of the younger grades while I taught Arithmetic to the 5^th graders or the retarded primer student. It all worked out. They studied, they learned, they sang and they had recess.

Recess was my learning time. They played a game much like cops and robbers which they called “Revenuers and Bootleggers”. I had never heard of it. How many “stills” the revenuers broke up, I will never know, but the game went on recess after recess all year long.

Occasionally, I introduced games like Follow the Leader, London Bridge is Falling Down, Ring around the Roses and “Run, Sheepy Run”. Rover Red Rover was popular with the younger students, but the sound of Bootleggers and Revenuers echoed through the Meadows of Dan.

Our entertainment in Slate Mountain consisted of weekly singing at the Edward’s or Belcher’s house. The Edwards’ boys both played guitar and I played, too We sang will the Circle Be Unbroken and Where is my Wandering Boy Tonight in voices that sounded more Primitive Baptist than Presbyterian. We had Pie Suppers where all the men vied to see who would get what, or who’s pie. The school was the community meeting place in the area. Frank dutifully took me to Stuart for a movie on most Saturday nights.

I mentioned that across from the school was a massive stone church built by the Presbytery of Roanoke, Virginia. A Mr. Childers* was the pastor. On Sunday, every parent and child were in church listening to a “fire and brimstone” sermons mainly on “sins of the flesh”.

I was charged with playing an old pump organ for the hymns. Even though I played well and sang lustily, I was always suspect in Mr. Childers’s mind because I wore, deliberately, red fingernail polish. This I bought when Frank and I would go to the movie on Saturday night. Nail polish and movies were “sins of the flesh” according to Mr. Childers.

Mr. Childers was pastor of Buffalo Mountain Presbyterian Church as well as Slate Mountain. He had been called from a life of sin to preach. He was married and had 5 big strapping boys. My sister, Attaway, taught at Buffalo Mountain School. One year she brought one of Mr. Childers’s younger boys, Cundiff, home at Christmas. The Lancaster family and guests were invited to a holiday dinner at our West cousin’s home. The Wests were farmers and made wonderful cheeses and blackberry wine. Somehow, Cundiff Childers drank down a small glass of wine. Attaway shrieked and took him from the room and washed his mouth out and tried to make him regurgitate. She retuned to the dinner telling all that Mr. Childers was never to hear that Cundiff had sinned!

During February of that year a woman outside the community of saints left her husband with four children, one a baby of six months. The whole community was horrified. Nothing would do but to adopt the baby temporarily to the Edwards household.

Lily Edwards and I walked to their home and brought the baby to the Edward’s. Lily would care for him in the day. The teacher, me, would care for him after 4:00 PM. Frank drove me to Floyd, Virginia where I got a formula for the baby. Mrs. Edwards prepared it. The baby’s sisters and Father came for him at the end of May. The sisters were out of school and could help their father take care of him. I remember only a chubby good-natured baby,

My life at the school was very hectic. The baby was a minor task what with cooking pinto beans on the pot-belly stove, making sure the water bucket was full and teaching seven grades the rudiments of arithmetic, geography, reading and writing, my day was full!

I discovered those school children had never hiked down Rock Castle Creek and had never been to Mabry’s Mill and waded in the small creek that turned the millwheel. They had never seen the miller turn their corn into meal. I remedied than situation by declaring Friday afternoon exploration day. We hiked over fields of wildflowers; we watched the miller turn corn into cornmeal for our cornbread; we sang every song I could think of that was appropriate; we lived and learned, even Arithmetic, and parsing sentences.

I never taught my primer boy to read “Run, Spot, Run”, but his older brother helped him to make a primitive wagon with wheels he’d somehow carver out and with a little wooden man on a buckboard seat!

I loved them all and they learned to love and to enjoy the beauty  of the earth around them. I shall never forget them or my first year of teaching in a one-room school.

Finnis

*Pastor Childers is the subject of a book “The Man Who Moved a Mountain.”

 Virginia Ruth Lancaster Shields was born July 6th, 1918 and lived until September 22, 2020. She a natural teacher and pursued that career for 42 years… a long journey from a one room schoolhouse in 1937 to her 26-year teaching career at the University of Georgia. She inspired, cajoled, tutored her charges to give their best. The outpouring of cards and letters at her death from her friends and students tell us she succeeded.

She was the best of Mama we three children could have been born to. She taught me the joys of music, storytelling, folklore and how to garden and tend livestock. She taught me guitar, and my Uncle taught me to sing use the guitar as backup.  Music has been the constant in my life. She could never teach me to "parse" a sentence, but I have survived without that skill.

Merry Christmas, Mama, from Robert Wayne, Sarah Virginia, and Patrick Rhodes Shields. You raised us well. You went far and saw much, leaving a legacy to be admired by all who knew you.