SIMMONS SCHOOL 1884-1914 was located four or five miles north of Eagleville on Rocky Glade Road. Bill Simmons gave the land on which the school was built.
The schoolhouse was a small, one-room, weatherboarded building. It had one door at the front and wIndows at each side.
The first teacher S. Monroe Crick who later became the County Court Clerk. At the age of four he contracted polio and always walked with a cane. Franklin Taylor, who married in 1878, was an early teacher. Others were Fannie Bell, Jordan Stanford, Mattie Smith Beasley, Mai White in about 1908, Era Hutchison in about 1897, and Susie Glenn.
Among the students at the school were Mai Shoemaker Ralston and Clara Holton Redmon, b. 1894, who attended SIMMONS SCHOOL her first two years. Other family names of students included Canton, Windrow, and McClaran.
The school term was for only three months, July, August, and September.
In 1914, the students of SIMMONS SCHOOL, along with those from GREENWOOD and MT. VERNON, were transferred to EAGLEVILLE.
School wagon drivers from the Rocky Glade area were Mr. Wray, Mr. Canton, and Mr. Ernest Snow.
In 1914, also, a brush arbor revival meeting was held on the school grounds. When the decision was made to build the Rocky Glade Cumberland Presbyterian Church on the property, the contract was given to Sam Card, a carpenter from Nashville, who had married a local girl. Mr. Card and his wife lived in the schoolhouse while the church was being built.
It is because of the name of the church and the name of the road that the school is at times referred to as ROCKY GLADE.
The Eagleville Church of Christ had its roots in a revival meeting held in SIMMONS SCHOOL in the 1880’s.
SOURCES: *Minnie Fairfield Dyer, The History of Eagleville, Dyer, 1972 . Interviews, April 24, 1985, with Olive Ralston Beeqie, whose father, Thomas Crawford Ralston, b. Feb. 14, 1881, always referred to the school as “Susie Glenn’s School;” July 1983, with Clara Holton Redmon; May 24, 1984, with
Ora Canton Bryant, who started school at the age of six along with her twin sister Ola and brother Walker; Oct. 8, 1984, with *Virginia Taylor Jackson; July 29, 1985, with Bertha Turner Snow, b. 1897. *Vera Covington.