1895 SCHOOL & 1912 SCHOOL BUILDINGS

Mr. Williams said that "Uncle Johnnie," his uncle, Judge Pierson, was on the school board of trustees. The old rock building was built by subscription. (The old two-story, square, stone structure with the cupola on top, destroyed by fire in 1912, on "College Hill." Built by subscription by selling stock at ten dollars a share. That Uncle Johnnie had been getting on big drunks, though when not drinking was perfectly sober and rational. (Old criminal dockets carried a suit against him for "official drunkenness, "whatever that may be. He was county judge.)

That W. T. Cropper and the other trustees decided it did not look right for him to be on the board, and they asked Mr. Williams to talk to him about not running for re-election. They beat him. That Uncle Johnnie went around quietly and bought up the shares which of course could be got cheap. He was going to close out the school, and that it took Mr. Williams, and Grandma Pierson, and all of them to persuade him not to do it.

(This was before the independent school district law, which was authored by state Senator Alva Chesley, of Bellville, my father’s older first cousin. Mr. W. T. Cropper,  with whiskers, was a good man, once ran for sheriff and got a sprinkling of votes, ran a meat market on the northwest corner of the square with his son Will Cropper when I first remember, and migrated with many others to Ochiltree County early in the century. )

(I remember Judge Pierson, but too young to talk to him. Remember him walking the upper porch of his mother’s old hotel, in Prince Albert coat and whiskers He was one of the first ever to go off to school from here, a military school, had many skills, including land surveying, making abstracts, was clerk for the state senate at a time, once ran a newspaper in a wild town in Indian Territory, and in an early day chased Indians and wrote about it. Some of familiar stories, like the school house massacre in 1867, appearing in Brown’s histories, were by him. When he died the school turned out and went to his funeral.)

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