Carter Elementary School,
photo circa 1960
This is a picture of the original, or at least earlier, Carter Elementary School. The building was constructed circa 1900 on the site where the Carter Christian Church is now located. This building accommodated grades 1 - 6; had no indoor bathrooms, and only pot bellied stoves for heat. Grades 7-12 were housed in the stone building that now houses the Carter Elementary School, since the formation of the East and West Carter High Schools. I attended this school from 1961-1966. The older boys were required to go into the storage area beneath the building and collect buckets of coal to keep the stoves going. In the winter, you either froze or sweated, depending on how close you sat to the stove. There were two small sinks and a water fountain, however the pipes usually froze and broke every winter and they weren't normally repaired until the summer break. So basically, we only had drinking water from September to December. There were no lunchroom facilities, so the students were loaded on a bus and taken to the high school (now the current Carter Elementary School) just up the road, for lunch each day.
The first grade teachers were Clevie McGlone and Cynthia Hilger. Second grade was taught by Christine Ramey. Third grade always seemed to have a new teacher for some reason. Fourth grade was taught by Hazel Menix. Fifth grade was taught by Carter Co. poet, Paul Salyers, and Sixth grade was taught by Norma McGlone. I can remember the bus trying to get up John Moore Hill in the snow and the older boys having to get off the bus and help the bus driver put chains on the bus to make it up the hill. There were nearly 75 students crammed onto the bus each day due to the shortage of buses. Because the same bus had to make two runs each morning and each evening (I lived approximately 13 miles from the school and there were others on our run that lived farther away) we normally had to catch the bus very early in the morning and didn't return home until nearly 5:00 in the evening. One year we missed so much school, because of the winter snows, that we had to go to school on Saturday for a couple of months to keep from losing the entire school year. Other teachers that taught at Carter High School, which included the elementary: Charlene Potter, Kathryn McGlone, Ines Dean, Virgie McGlone, Glenn M. Sparks, Marice McGlone, Iva Jesse, Faye Phillips (Librarian), Audrey Plummer, and Mildred Lewis.
The building may not have been very modern, but I still cherish some of the friendships that began there.
- Sherry Lowe
Submitted by Garrett and Sherry Lowe