BLACKMAN SCHOOL 1913-1939 was on the west side of Blackman Road, just north of the Baker Road intersection.
On December 6, 1913, J. C. Batey and wife Mary A. deeded two acres to the Rutherford County Board of Education.
The school was a frame building, weatherboarded and painted white, with two rooms, two cloak rooms, and two porches.
Among the teachers were Ada Beesley, the last teacher in the old school and the first in the new, Vallie De Wiese, who rode with a gentleman friend on a
motorcycle, Jack Jarman, Mary Short, Jewell Harris Lee, Frances Burgess McDonald, Betsy Nix, Annie Louise Ridings, and Bessie Lee Batey Haynes, the last teacher from 1925-1939.
Bessie Batey Haynes remembers taking the children to play ball at LONE OAK SCHOOL.
In 1939 the children were sent to CRICHLOW by bus. On November 6, 1939, the Rutherford County Board of Education sold the property to the Trustees of the Blackman Church of Christ, Millard Wayne Smith, Ernest Green Burgess, and Thomas Robert Alsup. After a new brick Church of Christ building had been erected in another location, LeVoy Bivins in about 1975 bought the old schoolhouse and converted it into a home. It is now a
duplex.
SOURCES: Deed Book 56, p. 354; Book 86, p. 184. Larry Jobe, “Blackman Community,” from the tiles of the Rutherford County Historical Society. Interviews: Feb. 13, 1983, with LeVoy Bivins; Feb. 9, 1983, with Lillian Brown Johnson; October 11, 1985, with *Bessie Lee Batey Haynes and Fannie Batey Talley, daughters of J. C. Batey.