Holly Springs Elementary School art teacher Alston Beckman created this special pen-and-ink drawing of the 1922 school as it once was. Prints of the drawing will be available at a celebration of the school’s history this Saturday at Holly Springs.

By Jason Evans

Staff Reporter

jevans@thepccourier.com

PICKENS — The upcoming closure of Holly Springs Elementary School will mark a sad end for a school that has linked a community for generations. The closing of the school will bring an end to a school and a tradition that is much older than many people may realize.

Dennis and Jane Chastain have been researching the history of the school — both the existing school building and its earlier incarnation — and have learned that the Holly Springs School story begins much earlier than many people realize.

Many people believe the school was started in 1926, but according to the Chastains, the Holly Springs story begins some 45 years earlier.

“All the published histories of Holly Springs Elementary indicated that the school started in 1926 on the knoll behind where the Holly Springs Grocery is now,” Dennis said. “The problem was that I knew that there had been a Holly Springs school long before that, but there was no documentation of it.”

While clearing the lot to build the Holly Springs Fire Department many years ago, a milled stepping stone was found. Chastain’s cousin, Vic Chastain, said the stone was from the first Holly Springs school built sometime in the 1800s.

Dennis contacted Anne Sheriff at the Faith Clayton Genealogy Room at the Southern Wesleyan University library.

“She said she would pull everything she had on old schools and put it on a table for us,” Dennis said. “When we got there several days later, the entire end of the table was piled with huge stacks of file folders and old books. It took me and Jane three trips at about two hours each to work our way through it all.”

But it was well worth the time and effort. Among the stacks of old school documents was a copy of the original charter for the first Holly Springs school. It was built in 1881.

“It was a subscription school, which was about the only kind of school that was available in the late 1800s,” Dennis said. “The way that worked, those who could afford it would pay a subscription for each child for each session.”

School sessions followed the planting seasons.

“We have a copy of John L. Gravely paying $3,” Dennis said. “I imagine that was for one child, for one session.”

Due to the small size of the school, enrollment was probably about a dozen students per session.

When mandatory school attendance was passed, enrollment nearly doubled — so much so that classes had to be held at the nearby Holly Springs Church.

Among the documentation was the original contract for the fellow who had contracted to build the building, along with the exact dimensions and a long list of other specifications.

“The builder was James Burdine, and the building was 18 feet wide and 28 feet long,” Dennis said. “I gotta tell you, this was all pretty exciting. We could now show that Holly Springs school had been in continuous existence in three different locations from 1881 to 2016. That’s 135 years, and I’m betting very few schools in Pickens County have that kind of history.”

The first two teachers at the school were Chastains — Willie and Mary, who were brother and sister.

“They ended up teaching at a number of schools,” Dennis said.

Until finding the records of the 1881 school, the earliest records of the school indicated that it was started in 1926.

Courtesy photo

This photo shows the current Holly Springs Elementary School as it looked when it was opened in its current location in 1954.

“We have a continuous record of a Holly Springs School from 1881-2016,” Dennis said.

“And then it’s going to end,” Jane chimed in. “It breaks my heart.”

Jane Chastain taught kindergarten at Holly Springs Elementary for 31 years.

“I loved every single day that I taught,” she said. “I still volunteer there every week, since I retired five years ago. It’s just that kind of place. It’s the place I want to be.”

Before she retired, Jane taught the children of children she’d taught earlier in her career.

“That just tells you how stable that community is,” she said. “That is a wonderful thing.”

“That school was the core of the Holly Springs community for over a hundred years,” Dennis said. “It’s what linked people in this really sparsely populated area.”

The Chastains’ first research foray led them to find the springs that the school is named after.

“Everything I read said that it was two springs that came together and there was a big holly tree growing between them,” Dennis said.

They went to the Holly Springs Fire Department, which was the site of the old Holly Springs School.

“We just went back in there and found it,” Jane said. “I had wanted to do that for years.”

Dennis believes that the old road students at the original school traveled was actually a segment of the Cherokee Path.

“You can trace that road all the way from right by the school, down across the river and off up toward the mountain,” he said. “A segment of it was later a toll road, called Sassafras Gap Toll Road. When they opened that road up, it was like I-26. There were thousands of people streaming out of western North Carolina into the lower parts of South Carolina and all the way into Charleston.”

Dennis and Jane Chastain’s research into the history of the Holly Springs community led them to the site that lent the area its name. “Everything I read said that it was two springs that came together and there was a big holly tree growing between them,” Dennis said. After a short venture into the woods, the two found the springs and came away with this photo.

The second Holly Springs School was built on a knoll behind what is now Holly Springs Grocery in 1922 — not 1926 as previously believed, Dennis said.

Miss Pearl Chastain was the first teacher at that school, Dennis said.

The school was a one-room building, but a two-teacher school. The school room could be divided, Dennis said, with little kids taught on one side and upper grades on the other.

“It had a wood stove, a well, an outhouse,” Dennis said. “All the modern conveniences.”

Records show that in 1947, the school had of enrollment of about 60.

In 1954, the school moved to its current location. At the time, counties had many local community schools with much smaller enrollments.

“You had a school that was basically limited to how far kids could walk to get to school,” Dennis said.

The state government began an effort to encourage counties to consolidate their small, local schools into larger, more centralized schools.

“There were several country schools that were consolidated to make Ambler (Elementary) and several country schools that were consolidated to make A.R. Lewis (Elementary), just like Holly Springs, about the same time,” Jane said.

“They consolidated 10 different area schools into one to make the Holly Springs building in 1954,” Dennis said.

The closure of the school “doesn’t make sense to anybody,” other than the four board members who voted to close it, Dennis said.

“There’s a lot of bad feelings — and there will be for a long time — about closing that school,” he said.

Before the school is closed, a special celebration is the works.

“We’ll be celebrating the life and legacy of Holly Springs Elementary School,” Jane said.

“We’re certainly not celebrating the closure,” Dennis added.

All former and current Holly Springs Elementary School students and their parents are invited to the celebration.

“Anybody connected with the school, we would love for you to come,” Jane said.

The bash will be held from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. this Saturday, May 14, at the school. A short PowerPoint history of the school will be presented. There will also be food, music and a bounce house for the kids.

A Holly Springs teacher has created a special pen-and-ink drawing of the 1922 school as it once was. Prints of that drawing will be available for sale at the event.

Current students are helping to put together a time capsule that won’t be buried, but stored at Pickens High School.

“Every child is writing out their memories (of the school) and we’re putting that in there,” Jane said.

Pickens mayor David Owens is expected to proclaim May 14 as Holly Springs School Day.

The school’s slogan for many years has been “The Small School with the Big Heart,” Jane said.

“It’s what you want every school to be,” she said.

“That’s absolutely true,” Dennis said. “That has been more than a school.”

A school located in a tight-knit community such as Holly Springs helps ease first-time students’ fears, the Chastains said, because many of the faces in the school are already familiar to them as members of the community.

“That extra nurturing that those kids got early on — and I’m sure hundreds of them would attest — has made a big difference,” Dennis said. “Some of them are still concerned about how these children from a remote part of the county are going to fare being dumped into these larger schools.”

“It was such a family environment. At our school, everybody knew everybody. The whole school was a family,” Jane said. “It still is.”