South Plains School

1925 photo of Sunset School, housed in a wooden building. 

I attended a rural school in Floyd County, Texas, and several years ago created a facebook group for  the South Plains School Alumni & Community.
Today one of the discussions took a bit of a  turn from remembering and honoring a community member who had died to a discussion of the school's history.
As it happened, a bit later in the day I came across an envelope of newspaper clippings from May 1988 when the school closed. It "was the last rural school in Floyd County and one of only seven in Texas." At one time there were 32 rural schools in Floyd County.
My family had attended South Plains School for three generations and we had family connections going back four.

The school  "opened in 1895 as Sunset

School, district number eight," in a one-room, wood frame building located 2 miles east of South Plains. Children walked, rode horseback, or came in buggies to attend. John Wilson, the oldest student of the school still living in Floyd County at its closing, started school at Sunset in 1914. They carried lunches (cold biscuit and sausage) in a syrup pail. He remembered "the big rain of 1919... which filled the draw west and south of Sunset from bank to bank." The teacher thought it unsafe for the students to cross the flood and sent them to nearby homes of Grigsby Milton, Sr., Charlie Wilson, and Mrs. Vera Snodgrass.


Top and bottom are views are 1927 photos of the brick Sunset School.
The middle view is the flat-roofed South Plains School,
rebuilt from those bricks. I attended that school
from the first through eighth grades.

"In 1926, a brick school building was erected one mile north (farther from that draw) from the original school. It was large for its days, containing eight rooms where an enrollment of 180 students studied. They ranged from primer to tenth grade." This new brick school building was I think located on the southeast corner of the half section homestead of my grandparents, Zach Carter and Oma Calahan Cummings. Her younger sisters and brothers attended the school. I think members of his family also attended Sunset School.
I think this building was also the first meeting place of the South Plains Baptist Church of which my great grandmother, Lala Delilah Shelby Calahan, was a member.
The location of new Sunset is marked by an electric substation on land still belonging to my family.
The Fort Worth and Denver Railroad arrived in 1927 and the town of South Plains was located platted on the railroad halfway between Floydada and Silverton, the county seats of Floyd and Briscoe counties, and an equal distance from Lockney. The Sunset community decided to "dismantle" and move its school to the new town. "Noel Deavenport, one of the students in all three schools--old Sunset, new Sunset, and South Plains--remembers helping clean the brick when the school was rebuilt." I can remember hearing my great uncles (Shelby and Junior Calahan) tell that same story. The South Plains school opened in the fall of 1929 with 133 students which would be the school's peak enrollment.
I have been gleaning information and quoting an article by Neta Marble and Jim Reynolds, The Floyd County Hesperian, Volume 92, Number 25, Thursday, June 23, 1988 published upon the closing of the school and its students going to either Lockney or Floydada.
Neta interviewed my father, Kendall K. Cummings, for that article. He attended ninth and tenth grades at South Plains School following the consolidation with Roseland School in 1935. (He had started school at Roseland. Yes, he rode a pony. Then attended school at Lone Star before moving back to Roseland. At that time South Plains offered only ten grades.
Quoting Daddy: "Well over a hundred students were enrolled. We had six rooms and there was somebody in every room." He adds that some students from Cedar Hill were also attending South Plains. "They were trying to get the school accredited with a full high school then, but it went the other way." Two years later, South Plains School "was cut back to nine grades."

After Daddy's graduation from South Plains in 1937 (we have the commencement program), he attended an additional year and graduated eleventh grade from Lockney High School in 1938. His younger brother, Sterling, and his sister, Delilah,  would follow in his footsteps.
The younger siblings, Mona, Jean, and Zach W.,  attended high school in Floydada.
By the time I attended South Plains School, it had only eight grades.


1988 photo Dallas Morning News, last days

It was cut down to six grades and had only twenty-seven students enrolled before it closed in 1988.
My brother's children, Kendall II and Victoria, had just finished the fifth and the second grades. She is the girl in pink on the left. He is the taller blond boy in the black and white shirt, at the back, fifth from the left.
There was a reunion-homecoming to mark the end of the era. I flew home for the party. We had one of those rare "big rains" and couldn't get there for all of the events. We were able to make the party for which my mother had baked dozens of cookies.

Newspaper articles were published in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Saturday, May 28, 1988 and in The Dallas Morning News, Sunday, May 29, 1988. I think there was some TV  coverage.

My aunt, Margaret Calahan, painted a picture.

My mother wrote a poem:



On the closing of South Plains School
1928 - 1988
by Dorthy Wieland Cummings



Country school stands in a bed of weeds.
Time has come!
No school smell--glue and sweaty kids.
The walls listen and long for laughter.
Hallways, missing footsteps
      of boys and girls
          running through,
                 happy skips of young feet.
Dead silence.
Where are they? Oh, where?
Gone!
           No more!
                         Forever...
                                         Just
                                                 dead
                                                             silence.
Memories live.

It's a mystery

When I was in the 4th Grade at South Plains School, J.B. Williams, became the principal and every two weeks (or maybe only once a month) he went by the public library in Floydada to check out a collection of books for his "country school" students.  I think the librarian selected them for him.  The books filled the large back seat of his car and the older boys carried then into the classrooms, sorted by grade levels.  My classroom had books for girls (Nancy Drew and stories about nurses) and books for boys (Hardy Boys and sports stories) and dog and horse books.  I usually managed to read all the girls' books, all the dog and horse books, and several of the boys' books before Mr. Williams brought the next bunch of books.

The Nancy Drew books were the most coveted;  all the girls wanted to read Nancy Drew.  I sometimes spent recesses and lunch hours telling the slower readers the stories so that they would give their books to me, which probably undercut the purpose of Mr. Williams hauling all those books around.  I read the first 37 books of the series, mostly in the editions illustrated by Bill Gillies:  Link to see Nancy Drew dust jackets   The Nancy Drew mysteries are "formula" ficition.  Carolyn Keene was a name owned by the publisher and the books were actually written by several people.  The first books (perhaps the first 23 in the series) were written by Margaret Wirt Benson for $125 each.  Benson wrote other books, many of which I read.  Link: Mildred Wirt Benson

After I finished whichever Nancy Drew books were in the stack, I read all the dog stories by Albert Payson Terhune, the first author's name I learned because someone else wrote dog stories that I didn't like at all.  I remember looking carefully at two of the books and discovered that the author made a difference.  I also remember showing the books to Mr. Williams and telling him which ones to bring next time.  I was a bossy little girl.  Some would say I never outgrew it.  

I also loved the books by Mary O'Hara; My Friend Flicka is the most well known probably due to the TV series.  I liked the one about the white stallion Thunderhead and in fact searched that book out for my collection.  Green Grass of Wyoming and Wyoming Summer are other titles.

The nurse books were the Cherry Ames mysteries by Helen Wells and the Sue Barton series by Helen Dore Boylston.  When I declared my intention to be a nurse, my parents said I should become a doctor instead because I liked to be in charge.  See, I really was a bossy little girl.

As I grew I read and read...  Mysteries were a big part of what I read:  Victoria Holt (one of the pen names of Eleanor Hibbert)  and Mary Stewart and the canon of classic mystery writers:  Eric Ambler, John Buchan, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Graham Greene, Dashiell Hammett, Helen MacInnes, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout, Josephine Tey, and Erle Stanley Gardner who wrote the Perry Mason series that my Gran Cummings loved and DMP continually rereads.

I know a lot of people who read mysteries--who in fact still read the mysteries I read.  My husband, and at least 2 of my sisters-in-law and my mother-in-law...   One of sisters-in-law in fact writes mysteries.  Link to Dee's website.  Houston has a whole bookstore devoted to mysteries which I visit with DMP two or three times each and every month.   {Sigh!}

I, however, don't read mysteries.  Somewhere between ages of  25 and 30 years, I pretty much quit.  I stopped reading mysteries and formula romances around the same time.  It was not a conscious decision as much as my having tired of the formulaic genres.  Around that time I wrote a romance novel which was never published and in retorspect I'm very glad it wasn't.

I read a lot of Victorian authors, I read some literary fiction, I read some theology but I don't read mysteries.

March Memoir...

When March comes in whether lion or lamb, I remember Mrs. Hewitt, my first & second grade teacher.  Her birthday was March 8th and for decades I never failed to send her a card (at Christmas, too) until her sister wrote me a few years ago that she was no longer able to see the cards or know that she was remembered. 

Here is a photo of the class with Mrs. Hewitt. 

I am the second grader on the top row left wearing the corduroy  dress with white PeterPan collar.

Here is the first grade photo with Mrs. Hewitt absent;

substituting  was Ruby Lee Higginbotham who later worked as the school janitor and our bus driver.  Tommy is the boy with glasses on the top row (he scooched down so he wouldn't be "too tall")

 and I'm standing in front of him.

Some years ago I wrote a memoir about her for a tribute to teachers sponsored by Borders Books. Sibyl Hewitt--I remember her hands at www.gather.com
That memoir dealt with her classroom and a special needs student, Tommy. But there is a sense in which every student has special needs.

I was in all her reading groups and when I read with the top group, "my" group, she never corrected my pronunciation. In the other groups we worked on my speech disorder--both a stutter and the inability to sound "s" when it came before a hard consonant. By the end of first grade, my speech was near normal. When we read aloud, she discouraged "calling words" and taught us "deportment" and "projection" and "inflection."

Teaching two grades at the same time while attending to the needs of gifted and special needs and non-english speaking students required much creativity in creating a willingness in all her students.  She bribed us. While Tommy had his time at the sandbox to keep him happy, other students had special work sheets and opportunities to color and do paper art. I did art only when it was required. My reward was my desk next to a bookshelf filled with books which I could explore when I finished my work.
She often used older or gifted students to help with the younger or those with needs. While a second grader, I sacrificed "my reading time" to sit at a desk with a tiny first grader who spoke no English. I had a bowl of candies (little multi-colored gummy things the size of minature marshmallows) which I dispensed to the little girl as we completed each page in her primer. When she went to her reading group she could read aloud like everyone else. Throughout the day other students engaged her one-on-one with jacks or crayons or girls-only sandbox. By the end of the first six weeks, she had learned a lot of English and made a lot of friends.
Long before there were "educators" and "mandates" and "in-service" ad inf. there were teachers.
Mrs. Hewitt was one of the best and in her class room there was no child left behind.

This Norman Rockwell illustration for the Saturday Evening Post (1946) evokes Mrs. Hewitt's classroom with some differences:  our stove was black and in the corner, our windows looked out onto a playground and the flat Panhandle plains, and we all wore shoes.

This illustration is from one of my favorite books:  The Faith of America illustrated by Norman Rockwell.  Text by Fred Bauer.  New York:  Artabras, 1980.  An excellent way to explore American history is through periodical art.  The following link has this photo in better color:  see more Norman Rockwall illustrations