Ayersville School Feb 2, 2013

The Ayersville School, was on a knoll along the west side of the Guard Camp road. It is now covered by a pine forest. A few corner and foundation stones remain, and there is a well depression with a cement block and hand pump located east of the school. Gertrude Brown Collier and her sisters, Willie Mae Brown Powers and Margie Brown Bentley, grew up in Brown's Bottom and could recall walking the road to this "old school house" everyday. She remembers walking it by herself when she was only seven years old. She also had a path that went along the top of the ridge and by an old grave yard. This was known as the "Burnt Meeting Place". In a 1922 Educational Survey of Stephens County, The Ayersville school is described as: " Area two acres, unimproved; no play appliances; supervised play; no gardens; no toilet. Value $800.00; one room; properly lighted; well kept; no cloak rooms; heated by stove; good ventilation; unpainted inside. Double patent desks; no teacher's desk; 20 in. Hyloplate blackboard; no charts; no globes; no pictures; no reference dictionary; a covered water cooler. One teacher; 5 grades; 42 pupils; no programs posted; no clubs; seven months school year (Duggan and Bolton 1922:27)."
Mrs. Collier wrote from memory about the school in the Ayersville community: "We started to school after the fall harvest until the spring planting. It was a joy to get away from work and play and be with other children. We could dress in underwear (union suits), with legs and long sleeves, long stockings, high top shoes, and a sweater and long coats. The weather was always cold in winter with lots of snow, rain, and sleet. We walked about three miles to school. We had a big pot-bellied stove which we had to fire up when we got to school. The wood was green and wet. The boys hunted pine knots in the woods to get the fire strated. It never got warm until we got ready to go home. We carried our lunch of biscuits with sausage, ham, jelly, or honey to school in a tin bucket. Sometimes we would wrap it up in a sheet from the Atlanta Constitution (which we got in the mail every day). The first grade through the seventh was taught in one large room. I was small but learned a lot by listening to what the higher grades were being taught. A big bell set on top of the building and it would ring when recess was up. We got water from a spring that had a bucket and dipper. We all drank from that. Later a well and a pump was put in. We pumped the water by hand. Our bathroom was the woods, the girls went in one direction, the boys in another direction. (We never met in the middle).
Gertrude attended grades 1-7, then repeated seventh grade two or three times. Then the family moved into Toccoa, in order for the two youngest girls to finish high school. One graduated in 1933.
Mary  Lee Steele went to Ayersville School for about two years. Mary remembered Gertrude Collier taught school at Ayersville while she was there. Paul Crump was a teacher there also.