This week we had a good visit with my cousin Don Sisk and his wife Leota, who live in Bentonville, and we spent an evening talking and looking at old family pictures. Two of the pictures were of the old Valley View School, where my mother and Don’s mother went to school in the 1920s.
The Valley View School was located between Bentonville and Pea Ridge in the Little Sugar Creek Valley, on what today is Price Coffee Road, about a mile west from Arkansas Highway 72. Valley View offered the first eight grades until 1949. After that the children in the community went to Bentonville.
My mother, Eunice Clement, would have started to school at Valley View in about 1922, and finished the eighth grade in 1930. My cousins Don and Bill Sisk grew up on the Burton Clement farm in the hills north of Bentonville, a few miles west of the Valley View School. Don and Bill finished eighth grade at Valley View in 1948, just a year before the school was closed. Valley View probably got its name from the scenic view across the valley, looking north toward Little Sugar Creek. Even today, the valley is a beautiful valley, although the sight of the old school building, wasting away on the hillside above the road, is kindof haunting and sad. I have heard that the City of Bentonville plans eventually to develop a city park in the valley below the schoolhouse, and that the old school might be restored to become an museum attraction within the park.
Mother used to talk to us about her school days, which she evidently thoroughly enjoyed. I can’t recall the names of teachers she spoke of, but I know that at least one of her Valley View classmates, Homer Walker, still lives in our area and often comes to our school reunions at Pea Ridge. My cousin Don told me the names of several Valley View teachers. Two of them surprised me because they were Pea Ridge ladies. Zelda Chiles, whose sister Nell was married to Hugh Webb of Pea Ridge, was an aunt to Mabel McKinney (Mrs. Fred) and ofJunior Webb of Pea Ridge.
Miss Chiles also taught at Pea Ridge. The last teacher at Valley View was Mabel Hardy. She later taught elementary classes at Pea Ridge until she retired in the 1970s. Miss Hardy lived in Pea Ridge on the corneracross from today’s Times newspaper office. She was my second and third grade teacher.
Mother’s Valley View stories gave me a picture of what living in a small rural community was like in the early 20th Century.
The instruction methods she recalled were intriguing to me. Teaching arithmetic seems to have involved a great deal of oral recitation and blackboard work, including blackboard competitions. In Mother’s school days, mathematical competitions were big events, not only in one’s own school, but in competitions between schools. Mother told of going to other schools, like Central School east of Pea Ridge, for big, exciting Ciphering Matches.
In those days they didn’t have athletic competitions, like basketball or soccer or baseball, but they had competitive spelling bees and ciphering matches. In the ciphering match, you would be up at the blackboard representing your school, and others from other schools would also be at the blackboard to race with you in computations. The caller would call out the problem. It might be a long division exercise, or a multiplication problem, or a sequence of numbers to be added. When the caller said “go,” the kids at the board raced to see who couldcomplete the problem first. The fastest cipherer was the winner, if her answer was correct. Mother was not a big one to boast, but I could always tell that she was pretty proud of her ciphering match triumphs.
She also told me that at graduation times, the small rural schools would come together at a larger school, such as Pea Ridge, where eighth graders graduating from all the rural schools would be given their diplomas by the county superintendent.
The Valley View schoolhouse also served as a church house and community building, holding gospel singings with dinner on the grounds, plays and pageants by the school kids, elections, fiddling and strumming sessions and pie auctions. Mother remembered Albert E.
Brumley coming to singings at Valley View. He wrote the song “I’ll Fly Away” in those days. She was amazed by his piano playing, and took inspiration from him for her own piano playing.
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Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 03/24/2010