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The Little Red School House of Chapel Hill, NC
by Charly Mann
Little Red School House Kindergarten Class photo from December of 1952 (Class of 1953). Chip Clark, is in the 2nd row, next to last on the right, wearing a horizontally-striped shirt. (Photo submitted by Peyton Clark)
For many young Chapel Hillians The Little Red School House on Dogwood Drive in Westwood is our first memory of school. Even though many of us also attended Mrs. Wettig's nursery school next to the Porthole Restaurant, most of us were too young to recall that experience.
Little Red School House first grade class of 1955 – 1956 class photo
Front Row – left to right – Bill Patterson, Rob Patterson, Martha Houck, Posey Henderson, Candy Foxworth, Cely Carter
Middle Row l to r – Barbara Thomas, George Steel, Tommy Harriss, West Mattis, Dianne Gooch, Carl Tyndall
Back Row l to r – Jay Josselyn, Charles (Charly) Mann, Margaret Holman, Ronnie Justice, Harriet Good, Bruce Whitcher
LIttle Red School House Class of 1957 (photo from collection of Deborah Miller)
1st row: Andy White, Annis Arthur, Susan Jane Curtis, Claiborne Jones, Connie Jo Clifford, Chuckie Oberleitner, Julie Harris, Jay Cole
2nd row: Teresa Gerrity, Mary Mac Cox, Liv Taylor, Gail Basnight, Brian Seff, Johnny Lindahl, Debbe Wagoner Jimmy Vine
3rd row: Jane West, Jimmy Hunt, Katie Reed, Dewitt Ashby, Robbin Andrews, Askold Boretsky, Steven Chapin and Scott Klinghorn
I entered kindergarten at the Little Red School House in September of 1954 when I was four years and nine months old. (I recently found out the entering age of most students that year was between five years four months and six years old.) Even after nine months at the Little Red School, I recall having difficulty holding a pencil correctly which made it hard for me to draw or write, but I loved the songs we often sang together especially, Row, Row, Row, Your Boat and Frère Jacques which we did in three and four part rounds. I also loved my carpool from Greenwood each day because it contained most of my friends who were then in the first grade.
Charly Mann, in dark outfit with Davy Crockett coonskin hat, and Dianne Gooch, first girl to my right in kindergarden at Little Red School House Chapel Hill, NC 1955
Charles (Charly) Mann - rendition of Little Red School House (age 4)
The Little Red School House was a small private school that only offered classes in kindergarten and first grade. It was a throw back to education before the Depression, when most schools had total local automy and all grades were educated in a single classroom. By the time I started there, kindergarden was held on the lower level, while first grade was taught upstairs. The Little Red School House was praised by many Chapel Hill parents because their teaching system emphasized individual attention and recognition for each student in contrast to the Dewey system of education used in the public schools where everyone was taught as a group. At the Little Red School House every student was supposed to be taught at their own pace.
1954 – 1955 Chapel Hill Little Red School House Kindergarten Class
Brook Barnes, Bucky Barnette, Craig Barton, Dick Blum, Ruth Bowers, Stephen Creamer, Cyntia Davis, Timmy Edney, Walter Fields, Buddy Fine (now Bob Jurgensen), Cathy Goldsmith, Dianne Gooch, Harriet Good, Tommy Harris, Robby Hawkins, Martha Hill, Gwen Hyman, Margaret Holman, Warren Hook, David Jenner, Barbara Jones, Allan Josselyn, Shaun Julian, Charles Lanham, Marshall McIssac, Charles Mann, West Mattis, Robert Patterson, William Patterson, Louis Perlmutt, Bobby Perry, Claude Piantadosi, Dirk Schenkkan, Ross Scroggs, Anne Thomas Smith, William Sprunt, Carl Strowd, Barbara Thomas, Bruce Whitcher, Lucie White, Bobbie Whitehill
Little Red School House Graduation 1956
The Little Red School House was built by Walter Geddie Fields, Sr. His son, Walter Geddie Fields, Jr., and granddaughter, Patricia Fields Neubert, lived on Dawes Street, in Forest Hills. As a five year old girl, she would walk to The Little Red School House by herself up Dawes Street to Smith Ave, and then through the woods to the school house.
Little Red School House Class of 1958
Jim Baucom – Stagecoach Road, Bill Daniel – 30 Davie Circle, Lloyd Davis – 11 Lea Court, Gary Garrison,– 412 Westwood Drive, Laura Sue Gaskin – Farrington Road, Charity Hardison – 179-A Jackson Circle, Lee Harris – 113 Maxwell, Vicky Hearn – (lived in Carrboro), Anne Huskey – 403 McCauley, Kris Jurgensen – 410 Whitehead Circle, Pat Kenney – 11 Hamilton, Roberta Layman – 404 Westwood Drive, Dee Ligon – 9 Powell Street, Donna Lynch – 132 Mason Farm Road, Tom Marshall – 64 Barclay Road, Pam Martin – (lived in Carrboro), Susie Mattis – 204 Friendly Lane, Rusty Mead – Church of the Holy Family, Martin Myer III – 50 Hayes Road
The Little Red School House building is now a private home and the playground is a forest.
Little Red School House Chapel Hill Class of 1953
On front row Alex Taylor is second from the left, Bobby Cadmus is forth from left, Danny Caston is next, and Victor Vance is third from the right
On second row Andy Julian is first on left and Arthur (now Dan) Gifford is second from the right in stripped shirt, next to Arthur is Gail Poe
On the third row Grove Burnett is in stripped shirt fourth from left, Gloria Burnett is sixth from left, and Joe Diconstanzo is on the far right
Comments:
Tom Carswell
4:13 PM Sat 6/5/2010
I have many fond memories of the Little Red School House. My parents
were good friends of Mrs. Harris. I'm 52 in the year 2010 and I still have memories of sitting on the rock wall while waiting for orange juice and saltine crackers that were serve at recessed. At that time I remember Mrs. Cook, Mrs. Cheek, and of course Mrs. Harris as the teachers.
I was often teased by my brothers that I flunked kindergarten. My mom had talked Mrs. Harris into letting me attend when I was 4 and then again at 5.
My Mom worked with my Dad at the Drug store.
I remember the black Crow that flew around the School House. I remember he would pull back the cars windshield wipers and let them go as my mom would drive up the hill from the school.
He was accused of flying into windows and taking items of value as well.
I often wonder what happen to that old bird.
From time to time we would see Mrs. Harris and she always looked the same, never to age and always pleasant.
A fine lady, I will never forget.
Tom Carswell
Allan (Jay) Josselyn
9:09 AM Sat 5/29/2010
I was really stunned to see this article. I just kind of stumbled on it. My earliest memories of school were of, fittingly, the Little Red School House.
I don't remember too much, but one of my favorite activities was recess when we were(sometimes) provided with big inflated inner tubes to play with. We would drag them up a hill behind the school building and let them roll to the bottom as we chased them and controlled their direction with a stick or something similar. It could get a bit rowdy, but I am sure the teachers appreciated our relative calm from exhaustion when we would return inside after recess
Also Davey Crocket was my idol in those days
Susan A. Fisher
9:47 PM Wed 3/17/2010
What fun to see this article and the photos. I attended kindergarten at the Little Red School House in 1955-56. I remember being the Christmas fairy in a school production. I was supposed to gently tap the children playing toys on the head and bring them to life, but I got a bit enthusiastic and my mother could tell by the startled looks on their faces and blinking eyes that I was pretty much bonking their little heads with my wand. Belated apologies.
We got to spend our days there in creative play, surrounded by dedicated teachers. Since there were no public kindergartens then in NC, those of us who attended the warm and welcoming Little Red School House were very fortunate indeed.
Ann Wadsworth Beck
5:25 PM Sun 1/3/2010
I too attended the Little Red School House.....kindergarten from Sept.1946 through first grade graduation in May 1948. Somewhere in the darkest recesses of the attic is my graduation picture. Mrs. Cook and Mrs. Thompson were our teachers. Now, here's the non-PC part. Corporal punishment was allowed then and took the form of having one's open palm smacked with a ruler and one of my most vivid memories was being so punished (only once) for 'talking instead of listening' one day. I'm afraid that I don't remember many of my classmates but Geddie Carlisle (walked to school from Pittsboro Rd.....barefoot half of the time!) and Tommy Scott do stick in my mind......Geddie for getting his palm smacked quite a few times and Tommy because I was in love with him. Sadly, Geddie died some years ago after we had graduated from CHHS in 1960. Tommy moved to Davidson after we graduated from the Little Red School House and I lost track of him. Sigh.
We went on to the elementary school on Franklin St......Mildred Mooneyhan, principal...... where our second grade class had both first and second grades in one room. WWII had brought so many students to UNC on the GI Bill that the school was jammed with children. I think there were many lower classes doubled up to make room for the older classes to have rooms to themselves....some used the auditorium, lunch room, and library too.
That time also brought trailer parks set up in every available open lot in town and on the campus to accomodate the GI families. Behind Swain Hall and the Methodist Church was the one I was most familiar with since that was our church and I had a friend who lived in a trailer there. I thought it was the neatest thing to live in a little play house like that. Today's trailers are mansions compared to the tiny boxes they had then! No AC, to boot!
But.....I just can't remember when all the trailers disappeared. But, that's another story.
I could go on and on and on having lived in CH from birth until I went away to college in 1960. My parents lived there until 1990. I was a university brat......father, director of Mens' Housing.......mother, Central Records.......Uncle Robert, chancellor.
I only include that last paragraph for your use, Charly, as a help in placing me in the CH loop of folks who enjoy your site only recently introduced to me. Small town that CH was in the '40s and '50s, there weren't many folks we didn't know or, at least, know of. Thank you for the site and great mind pictures it evokes!
Charly Mann
8:46 PM Sat 12/19/2009
Thank you so much Sarah for your information on Mrs, Wettach. I was just at those rocks myself, and had several photos taken of me there as well. Please send me an e-mail with further details of your recollections. Mine are actually very spotty in terms of nursery and elementary school.
Sarah Geer
6:11 PM Sat 12/19/2009
Charlie, a minor correction: the nursery school near the Porthole was run by Mrs. Wettach (not Wettig), whose husband was the greatly respected dean of the UNC Law School. I remember Mrs. Wettach and some of our games and activities at the nursery school very well, especially the enormous rocks where we would wait for our mothers to pick us up. (They don't look enormous to me any more.) I used to joke that I started school at Mrs. Wettach's kindergarten, and finished it at Van Hecke-Wettach building, the UNC Law School, named after Robert Wettach. Thanks for collecting all this information. It's a treasure trove of memorabilia of our era. Sarah (then Sally) Geer
Francie Ellis Segar
5:37 AM Mon 10/12/2009
Great memories of the Little Red School House. Our mom...(Barbara,Marybeth,Francie & Frieda)...Elizabeth Ellis was the music teacher there for several years. She taught music to James Taylor! Other teachers were Cora Lee Berkut,Grady Cook and Auburn Harris.
I remember playing those bottles and being very nervous when I had to sit in my nightgown in a little rocking chair at one of the end-of-the-year programs.
Somewhere I have other photos of earlier classes. Will send them to you as soon as I can find them(and blow off the dust!)
Francie
Emily Robison
1:38 PM Wed 9/30/2009
Thanks for the piece about The Little Red School House. From 1986 to 2002 we lived across the street from what use to be this school, and always wondered about the building's history.
Miranda Black
9:42 AM Tue 9/29/2009
I'm jealous of you guys from the 50s. I grew up in Chapel Hill in the mid 1980s, and that idea that a five year old girl could walk several blocks and then through the woods to get to kindergarten is preposterous to me. I don't think my parents let me cross a steet by myself in town until I was eleven.
Bob Jurgensen
7:33 AM Tue 9/29/2009
Thanks again Charly,
...for all your efforts to post these glorious details about CH and it's people. I too was a Little Red School House kindergartener and we were indeed classmates! I even found my step-brother Kris in one picture and my Aunt Jo in another picture on a different section. This is no doubt an act of love for your hometown and it's people and as such it reflects the lure of CH that I suspect looms in all of us.
Having spent the majority of my formulative years growing up there, my mom being an editor (Town & Gown section) of the CH Newspaper for some 30 years (on and off), which back then was a weekly paper... connects me even more so. My grandmother owned a home on Rosemary St where she ran a beauty parlor (Nonnie's Beauty Nook, if I recall correctly) out of of the back of her home. I recall one name, Mrs. Marley, who lived across the street, who was one of her beautificians. As a child growing up I vividly recall the odors of a beauty parlor (permanents!) and the coming and going of woman who went in looking, well, less than beautiful and who came out "all dolled up" - fascinating to a 6 year old boy.
One story I will share with all about the Little Red School House, that my mom used to speak of often, was the day Hurricane Hazel came to visit CH in 1954. I recall some of those details but not much - however according to my mother she learned the storm was coming by AP wire at the paper and took off to pick me up early from the school, dodging trees and limbs to and fro, to take me to the safety and sanctuary of my grandmother's home - who just happened to have a basement. She got us there in the nick of time, because a huge oak tree fell on the beauty parlor section of her house only minutes after our arrival - I can recall, vividly, the pounding rain on those little tiny windows in her basement.
When the eye of the storm arrived, my (step)grandfather (we called him Pop, but his name was Joseph Rockefeller Bissell, yes he was related to THE Rockefeller's, and had a card in his wallet to prove it), who was convinced it was all over, went outside to investigate and I can remember my grandmother screaming at him to get back inside because there was more storm to come. She was right, of course, because the siren(claxon?) on top fo the PD started to go off again - (side story: back then the town siren would wale with X number of pulses - each one had a specific meaning - primarily it was used back then to call volunteers to the Fire Dept, but if I remember correctly, the front of the phone book had the codes to decipher what they meant - since CH was a relatively small town back then, it clould easily be heard from the Carrboro line to the far side of the campus - which was maybe Memorial Hospital area).
No sooner than she managed to wrangle him back inside, the storm started up again as we huddled in the basement; my mother, being somewhat terrified of storms, had us all pretty scared that day because of her [in this case, well founded] fears of storms in general. I later learned that those fears apparently do pass through DNA as my youngest daughter has that same healthy fear of storms to this day.
I fully plan to go through my archive of goodies from my mom's [Paquita Morton (Fine) Jurgensen Shaffer] chest of memories that I inherited upon her death and share those with you over the Fall months as I sort them out - this is one great excuse to organize all this stuff and digitize it for my children's memory books, so you now have me hooked - I hope OTHERS will share as well - you have obviously spent so much time doing this it would be such a small task on the part of others to dig a little and share what they have to further enhance and enrich the content of this site, which, as far as I am concerned, is already a wealth of information if you were to stop now - which I hope you don't.
So many hundreds of thousands of students have walked, cried, celebrated and have fond memories of the streets of CH, especially Franklin St, that this site strikes a chord in us all, even those "temporary" citizens of CH. It is so well balanced and forthright, the good, the bad and yes, even the mystery of crimes of CH are included, I think you deserve a MEGA "Gold Star" from the Little Red School House gang! GOOD JOB CHARLY!!! I look forward to helping you enrich it even more in the coming months.
Bob (Buddy / Robert Fine) Jurgensen
(I changed my name in my late teens to my step-father's, Kai Jurgensen, for personal reasons and the love he instilled in me for life, something I had nearly lost growing up in a broken home)
PS: should any of my long lost friends wish to contact me directly, to touch base or perhaps just say hello, my email is, fittingly enough:
TarHeelinVA@aol.com - I would love to hear from YOU!
George Clark
8:17 PM Mon 9/28/2009
Thanks for doing the piece on the Little Red School House. I've been looking for years for something on my former kindergarten.
Chapel Hill is located on a hill whose only distinguishing feature in the 18th century was a small chapel on top called New Hope Chapel. This church was built in 1752 and is currently the location of The Carolina Inn. The town was founded in 1819, and chartered in 1851.
What is it that binds us to this place as to no other? It is not the well or the bell or the stone walls. or the crisp October nights. No, our love for this place is based upon the fact that it is as it was meant to be, The University of the People.
-- Charles Kuralt
Dark Side of the Hill -- Pink Floyd, the creators of the most popular album in history, Dark Side of the Moon, took the second half of their name from Floyd Council, a Chapel Hill native, and great blues singer and guitarist. He once belonged to a group called "The Chapel Hillbillies".
Check out Charly Mann's other website:
Oklahoma Birds and Butterflies
http://oklahomabirdsandbutterflies.com
Oklahoma Birds and Butterflies
http://oklahomabirdsandbutterflies.com
There would probably be no Chapel Hill if the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees in 1793 had not chosen land across from New Hope Chapel for the location of the university. By 1800 there were about 100 people living in thirty houses surrounding the campus.
The University North Carolina's first student was Hinton James, who enrolled in February, 1795. There is now a dormitory on the campus named in his honor.
The University of North Carolina was closed from 1870 to 1875 because of lack of state funding.
William Ackland left his art collection and $1.25 million to Duke University in 1940 on the condition that he would be buried in the art museum that the University was to build with his bequest. Duke rejected this condition even though members of the Duke Family are buried in Duke Chapel. What followed was a long and acrimonious legal battle between Ackland relatives who now wanted the inheritance, Rollins College, and the University of North Carolina, each attempting to receive the funds. The case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and in 1949 UNC was awarded the money for the museum. Ackland is buried near the museum's entrance. When the museum first opened, in the early sixties, there were rumors that his remains were leaking out of the mausoleum.
The official name of the Arboretum on the University of North Carolina campus is the Coker Arboretum. It is named after Dr. William Cocker, the University's first botany professor. It occupies a little more than five acres. It was founded in 1903.
Chapel Hill's main street has always been called Franklin Street. It was named after Benjamin Franklin in the early 1790s.
Chapel Hill High School and Chapel Hill Junior High were on Franklin Street in the same location as University Square until the mid 1960s.
The Colonial Drug Store at 450 West Franklin Street was owned and operated by John Carswell. It was famous for a fresh-squeezed carbonated orange beverage called a "Big O". In the early 1970s, I managed the Record and Tape Center next door, and must have had over 100 of those drinks. The Colonial Drug Store closed in 1996.
Sutton's Drugstore, which opened in 1923, has one of the last soda fountains in the South. It is one of the few businesses remaining on Franklin Street that was in operation when I was growing up in the 1950s.
Future President Gerald Ford lived in Chapel Hill twice. First when he was 24, in 1938, he took a law couse in summer school at UNC. He lived in the Carr Building, which was a law school dormitory. At the same time, Richard Nixon, the man he served under as Vice President, was attending law school at Duke. In 1942, Ford returned to Chapel Hill to attend the U.S. Navy's Pre-Flight School training program. He lived in a rental house on Hidden Hills Drive.
Thank you for the gift of this piece on the Little Red School House, Charly. I attended the Little Red School House as a first grader in '55-'56 because I had a late birthday and wouldn't have been able to start 1st grade in a public school until a year later. The Little Red School House was where I split my head open when I fell on the rock wall. I still have the scar. I had a crush on Barbara Thomas and managed to sit beside her in our class picture. West Mattis taught me that 12x12=144. I was a Wise Man in the Christmas play. We weren't supposed to wear shoes for the play, and my big toe stuck out of a hole in my sock. When my mother in the audience saw it she couldn't stop giggling.
This piece confirms that I didn't dream it all happened.
Thank you, Charly.