Hollandale School 1924-1936

HOLLANDALE SCHOOL 1924-c 1936 was in District 2 in the present Hollandale area of Lavergne. On January 15, 1925, Arnanda McLaughlin, W.N. McLaughlin, and Mrs. G.W. Gooch, Sr., deeded to the Rutherford County Board of Education two acres of land for a common school. It was located on the old Hollandale Road and was bounded by R.P. Edmondson, G.H. Weakley, and the McLaughlin heirs. It replaced SINKING CREEK SCHOOL which had burned.

The school was a one-room, weatherboarded building. It had a small porch with a gabled roof.

Annell Smith, the last teacher at SINKING CREEK, was the first teacher at HOLLANDALE. She was later assisted by Thelma Coleman. Louise Travis, Louise Drennan, who was both a student and then a teacher, Amanda Gooch, and teachers by the names of Covington and Fults also taught.

Grades were one through eight.

Family names of students included Ward, Smith, Burnett, Hedgepath, Waldron, Rader, Warrick, Jaco, McDowell, Todd, Carter, Briley, Butner, Edmondson, Robinson, Palmer, and Williams.

Amanda Gooch, who taught in 1929, remembers riding to school on horseback in good weather and in a buggy when the weather was bad. She also has vivid memories of shoveling coal from under the snow for the pot-bellied stove.

When the school closed, pupils were transported to La Vergne and Smyrna schools.

On April 14, 1950, Mattie B. Edmondson bought the two acres of land from the Rutherford County School Commission. The school building was used first as a church and then as a home. It is still standing in 1985.

SOURCES: Deed Book 105, p. 570; Book 106, P. 48. Interviews, Aug. 2, 1984, with Mary Sutton Mason; Aug. 20, 1985, with Joe R. Edmondson who started first grade about 1929; Aug. 20, 1985, with May Law Gooch Johns. Letter,
dated July 21, 1984, from Benton McMillian Mason and Benton M. Mason, Jr. *Amaflda Gooch. Hoover, p. 273.

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