Excerpt from interview of Mr. R. M. Buchanan, August 3, 1973, interviewed by Cindy Legard.
CL: Where and when were you born?
RB: I was born in Rich Valley on December 13, 1897. I have a twin sister.
CL: Have you lived most of your life here?
RB: Yes. I had college one year at Emory during the war, and then I transferred to VPI and took four years there and completed my master's the fifth year at VPI in agriculture education.
CL: How did your parents make their living?
RB: They were farmers right down the road here. You passed a brick house on the right. They lived there all their life. All my family was born there. My father was a farmer all of his life, and he never did move. His father, my grandfather, moved there somewhere around 1830 and my father was the youngest child. He was born there in 1847. Every foot of it is still in the family -- twelve hundred acres.
[Here Mr. Buchanan tells of his family with many names of places and people, dating from 1745 and a land grant from the King of England]
CL: Where did you go to school?
RB: I went to a little school down here called Carter's School, then I transferred to Saltville High School. I didn't have quite enough units to graduate when World War I came along, so I went over to Emory and went into the army. They called it the SATC -- Student Army Training Corps __ which we trained for officers. I stayed there until after the armistice and during the great flu epidemic. I was scheduled to go on for further training when the armistice was signed. I was at Emory and we just about tore that place apart. I stayed there a year. I took some courses and made good on them and transferred to VPI because I couldn't get credit for any of my courses, so I had to stay an extra year at VPI. I took my master's degree, as I said a few minutes ago, at VPI.
CL: What do you remember about the Carter School? That school is not still standing, is it?
RB: No, there is a house where that stood. The first school that I went to is Lyon's Gap. I went to Carter's School; we thought that was a great consolidated school. I had gone to Lyon's Gap, which was a little elementary school, and for two or three years we had a governess in our home. We paid, and there were about four or five of us and a neighbor's girl, and I had about three years of that. We paid this governess so much and boarded her and I got right much of my elementary education that way.
Then I went to the little one-room Lyon's Gap School, which had all the grades in it, first through seventh. I remember that we had the multiplication table at Lyon's Gap. The teacher promised to whip me if I didn't say the ninth line of the multiplication table perfectly. I was so scared but I said it right down the line, and I smiled and all the others in the room smiled because they knew what was going on. Then he looked at me and said, "Now, say it backwards." So I had to say it backwards.
CL: Yes, they would call such a bench in the first school that I went to. They would say, "Fifth grade arithmetic to read." All of us were in the same room and they would pick one to go up to the board and work problems and they would ask questions. Every Friday afternoon we had to have a little literary period. We would have speaking and each of us would have a little recitation that we would have to memorize on Friday afternoon. Then we would have a spelling match. Two of us would choose up with one line here and one line over there and you would give words to trap them. If somebody missed a word and you spelled it, the other one would have to sit down. We learned to spell that way because it was a game.
[Here follows a colorful account of the churches, the entertainment, and life in Rich Valley and surrounding area. The discussion does not return to the subject of school again except for a brief mention of Mr. Buchanan's work in the school during the great depression.]
RB: ...A man went bankrupt and I bought this farm for fifty-one dollars an acre, and even then I was coaching at Saltville High School.
There wasn't any money. I went to Saltville one morning and they were all standing out in the street and the bank was closed. But people weren't too nervous; they had plenty to eat. A great many of them were in debt; I was in debt and my brother was in debt. We didn't have any money; we had other things -- we had food, but we didn't have any money.
I had some men who lived across that mountain and they came over and said they were hungry and they wanted to work for me. I told them that I didn't have any money, but I had a wheat crop and if they wanted to harvest a wheat crop and take it to mill, I'd give them a bag of flour for a days work. That was in 1931, I think. The next morning there were about ten or fifteen. They walked all the way across that mountain, worked twelve hours, and walked all the way back for a bag of flour. I sold my wheat for sixty cents a bushel.
[More description of depression prices, debt, and mention of Roosevelt's recovery plan.]
RB: I was teaching on a salary at Saltville. I was principal at Saltville High School for $242.00 a month. Anyway, I bought this farm and paid fifty-one dollars an acre for it, and now it's worth four hundred. But, then I thought I couldn't pay for it.
[Discussion of crops, business, and family life, and of how the area has changed.]
Excerpt from interview of Mrs. Evelyn Manly, Glade Spring, Virginia, July 12, 1973, interviewed by Laura Stevenson.
LS: Where did you grow up?
EM: My name is Evelyn Gillenwater Manly. I was born November 20, 1904. My maternal grandparents were Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Ryan and they lived in Washington County all the time that I can remember from my early childhood. I think my grandfather was originally from Eastern Virginia. It was somewhat evident from his conversation because occasionally a little Eastern Virginia pronouncement would creep into his conversation. For instance, he always talked about the "garage" or however he managed to pronounce it. My maternal grandmother was, I don't think a bound woman, but she was an orphan and was reared b y a family by the name of Mallicut. They had four children, two boys and two girls. My mother, Eliza, was the youngest daughter of the family.
LS: What did they do for a living?
EM: They were farmers. They were not even one generation from the Civil War devastation....
[Here is an extensive and colorful description of family life]
I am the second child. When I finished high school I wanted to go into training as a nurse, but nursing was not considered the most respectful job a young woman could do then. About the only thing that was acceptable was to teach. My grandmother objected seriously to a grandchild of hers going into nurses training. At that time nurses worked twelve hours a day and, so I was told by many nurses since, that when they were in training they did scrub floors and walls, etc. The only walls I ever scrubbed were at the time when the Director of Nurses came in and saw me fling ink from a pen onto the walls; so I scrubbed that wall. We did twelve hour duty. I went into training at Lewis Gale Hospital in Roanoke, and we did twelve hour duty for the most part until I finished training in 1927. By the way, there was a little interim in there when I taught school for two years. That was back in the days when a person had finished high school they had a "real good" education. I'm sure mine was superior because I was a tom-boy girl and lessons weren't too important. But, anyhow, you could qualify and I taught school in one room for one year.
LS: Where was the school?
EM: The school was down below Bristol in a little community; the name of the school was Walnut Road. This was when compulsory education first began in Virginia, and I thought that whatever the law was, I had to see that it was carried out. Those mountaineers that had a tremendous amount of character and weren't going to take a lot of "guff" from a little upstart seventeen year old girl, decided that they would get rid of the teacher. The first thing they did was to see that we didn't have any wood. We took care of that little situation by declaring school out and the big boys and girls that were in school got out and got wood in from one of the friendly patrons we had. There may be wood stacked up against that little schoolhouse yet. The second year I taught in a two room school and taught from the primary through the fourth grade. I won't say taught because I think that is exaggerating a little bit when you talk about a seventeen or eighteen year old girl teaching.
LS: Did you have wood stoves to heat the schools then? Where did you get the water, or did they have water in the schools?
EM: We had a spring for the water. One of the highlights as far as the students were concerned was to be able to go to the spring to bring back water. This would happen among the teenagers that might have crushes on each other, so we never had any trouble getting water. We did have trouble keeping warm because the snows were very deep and some of the children came a long way. It was a rewarding year, and I've known this since I've been teaching, because if people want to learn, they'll learn in spite of the teacher. My parents lived in Glade Spring but had lived in Saltville when I was a very young girl. I started school in Saltville. Incidentally I was in the same class with Bob Porterfield. We used to watch him real closely because he could hardly pronounce his words; he hadn't learned to speak distinctly yet. And then we moved to Glade Spring and I went to school over here for all those years, from about the fourth grade through the eighth. Our high school lasted for four years, from the eighth through the eleventh, because we didn't have a twelfth grade in those days, certainly not in this county. We were fortunate enough in our high school years to have three outstanding teachers. One of them was the brother of the County Superintendent, as everybody called Old Professor Bill Edmondson, and he was the brother of Joe edmondson, the principal of the high school when I started up here. Two outstanding teachers were Miss Gladys Harvey and Miss Adelaide Lyons, both of whom are still living. They had both taught in Northern schools and they came down here and wanted to do a little missionary work among some of us people who had never been out in the world. There were very few elective subjects; everybody took math, algebra, geometry, Latin, and we felt extremely fortunate that we had a French teacher and real good one. Miss Lyons was an outstanding English teacher. Instead of having some of the more frivolous plays that some of the students were having, we had Shakespearian plays.
[Interview continues.]
Excerpt from interview of Ms. Nannie St. John of Chilhowie, Virginia, retired school teacher, interviewed by James H. Groseclose.
[Here Miss St. John speaks about her parents and of moving from Smyth County to Washington County when she was six years old.]
JG: What about your schooling?
NS: I started school at Riverside, but most of my schooling was at Barrack; I finished at Barrack. It wasn't a high standard high school but I finished the 11th grade at Barrack. And then when I went to college I had to take one year's college work to make up for my high school, and then I could begin to take professional work at college or take college work.
JG: Do you remember any of the teachers out here at Barrack and what times were like then?
NS: Yes, we had a two-room school at Barrack and both rooms were overloaded. There were so many children that we sat four on one seat and they were so crowded that very often we would go off on the floor.
JG: You would push each other out of the seat?
NS: Yes, we didn't have much room. There were four of us on one of those seats and we'd fall off on the floor. We'd tell our teacher but she'd say she would see about it but she never did have time to come around to see what we were doing or how we were getting along. JG: Was that one of the biggest disadvantages -- overcrowding?
NS: Yes, it was, and we never had much attention from the teacher. She had so many that she didn't have the time to give us much attention. And if we had time to prepare our lessons or couldn't prepare them without help, we had to go on anyway. For our classes, we'd have long seats -- benches -- and when they'd call our class, we would go up to our class. We didn't teach like we do today.
JG: Was it a kind of recitation bench? Was that what it would be called today?
NS: It was a recitation bench; a great big long bench. It would hold about ten or twelve or more, and I don't know where the rest of them sat.
JG: After you graduated from school, you taught for a long while. Do you have any memories of your early teaching -- what the wages were, and how the times were then?
NS. When I first began to teach, my salary was $35, and I paid $12.50 board. And besides the board, we had to furnish our brooms, chalk and all the material that we had to use in the school.
JG: Where did you first start teaching?
NS. At Green Cove. That was my first school.
JG: Do you remember when that was?
NS. It was in 1918 or '19.
JG: Where did you go from there?
NS. To Murreyfield -- the second year I taught at Murreyfield. I still had a large number of children in those old timey seats and I had about 55 to begin with. But the principal went to see the superintendent and he put in an extra teacher and that relieved me of one grade. I had from the 3rd grade down. We had three teachers at Murreyfield; and Miss Cole had the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th grades, and Miss Mary Bonham, the principal, had all the high school. She had the 8th, 9th, 10th grades. We just had through three high school grades.
JG: You didn't have compulsory education in those days. What do you think accounts for the fact that you had such large classes? Do you think the students just loved school?
NS. They loved school, I suppose. There were so many children around, they just went to school. No, we didn't have compulsory education.
JG: You mentioned you had to buy a lot of your own supplies; was that one of the main hardships of teaching in those days?
NS. That was very hard at times because we didn't have any supplies at all. We had to buy our own supplies -- what we used or had. I began to accumulate a few along as I could.
JG: From Murreyfield, where did you go to teach?
NS. Barrack School. And at Barrack School, we had three rooms. They taught high school and we had just two teachers at Barrack in the beginning. Mr. Grant (?) Preston and Miss Edna Buchanan were the teachers when I first went, and we had large classrooms. Both of them were filled; and after so long a time, they built an extra room. Then the school kept improving so and we had a high school, and we had four teachers. We had two high school and two elementary teachers.
[Here is a discussion improvements over the years.]
JG: What about some of the conveniences? How did they change over the years? Did you find as time went along you got more and more supplies and had more to do with?
NS. Yes, I kept adding to my supplies. All that I had was what I accumulated myself or purchased.
JG: How was it for the students? Did they have to supply their own books?
NS. Yes, they had to buy their own books.
JG: The county didn't supply them or give them any, did it?
NS. No, they didn't We had to buy them and they had to buy their own books.
JG: What about some of the things that you needed in the school house like coal and wood? How were they supplied?
NS. We used wood, and the parents furnished it. Each parent, or the ones that could, would bring a load of wood. They kept us in wood and then the children would cut that wood and bring it in. We used wood for years and then later we got till we could get coal. That was after the new building -- brick building -- Barrack, was built. And they put a furnace in the building.
[Interview continues]