| New Brown’s Chapel School has 100 years of history |
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By: MICHELLE WILLARD, Post Staff Writer
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Posted: Sunday, August 2, 2009 8:15 am
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The 1903 Brown’s Chapel School class picture graces the walls of the new Brown’s Chapel Elementary. Blackman residents Mr. and Mrs. Ed Jordan donated the photo to the school.
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Rutherford County Schools has come “full circle” with the opening of Brown’s Chapel Elementary School, School Board Member Wayne Blair said.
Brown’s Chapel Elementary in the Blackman community is the newest addition to Rutherford County Schools and is named for a school that operated a scant half-mile from the site almost 100 years ago.
“I compare it to my own first- and second-grade experience,” Blair said about the old Brown’s Chapel School. “First grade was … a two-room, clapboard building with eight grades.”
The Smyrna-area school only had two teachers and one doubled as a principal, he said.
In second grade, he moved to a three-room schoolhouse in Almaville that housed eight grades.
In the ensuing years, the county moved away from community schools like those Blair was educated in and toward larger comprehensive schools, like Riverdale and Oakland high schools.
But now the system is moving back to community schools.
“There’s more buy-in because they’re named after the community they were built in,” he said. “We’re coming full circle.”
And Brown’s Chapel is the latest community school to open in the county.
The school, which holds its grand opening at 2 p.m. today, is a 130,000 square-foot building and can house 850 kindergarten through fifth-grade students.
The new school will be led by Kellye Goostree, who comes fresh from serving as the principal at Cedar Grove Elementary.
The school is named for the original Brown’s Chapel School that operated on Baker Road from 1876-1910 in the Little Hope area.
John L. Batey, Blackman’s resident historian, remembers the building from his childhood, when he would attend church there with his family.
The church was named for the Methodist church’s first preacher, Allison Brown, Batey said.
“They just referred to it as Brown’s Chapel,” Batey said. The Batey family attended the church until it moved in 1959 and became the Blackman Methodist Church.
The school was built in 1876 on land and with lumber donated by Alfred Blackman, Batey’s great-great-grandfather.
“They needed a church and school and he donated the land and the wood,” Batey explained, adding the one-room, frame building with shuttered windows was used as a school during the day and as a church at night.
Many Bateys, Blackmans and Beesleys were educated in that one-room school house, he said.
But, when it closed, students moved to the old Blackman school that was on the grounds of the present-day Blackman Community Center. The building was used as a grocery store and a barn before it was torn down due to disrepair.
But now Brown’s Chapel Elementary School returns as a technologically advanced building, complete with a 50-year metal roof, educational technology and geothermal heating and cooling.
“Now we have state-of-the-art technology and buildings,” Blair said. “I’m amazed at how Rutherford County has progressed over the years.”
Both Batey and Blair see Brown’s Chapel as a gift to Blackman in the form of a community school.
“There are so many houses and families … and it’s tremendous gift to the community,” Batey said, “(near) same location as a lot of those people’s (families) went to school.”
Michelle Willard can be contacted at 615-869-0816 or mwillard@murfreesboropost.com. |
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