Of Years Gone By

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Iris Woodard's 60 pupils huddled around the pot-bellied stove on a cold January morning in 1929. Temperatures made preparing for the community spelling bee that night difficult.

For $95 a month, Mrs. Woodard was Nine Mile School's only teacher then. First through eighth grades were her responsibility in the one-room schoolhouse.

Somehow the lessons got learned at the school she calls "our institution of higher learning" because it was built on a hill.

Almost half a century later, Mrs. Woodard joined several other former teachers, pupils and their families yesterday at the Nine Mile School reunion.

The school was razed long ago, after Cabell County took over its operation. Its last year of classes was 1934. In the second grade that term was a youngster named William H. Langdon Jr. His mother, Label Langdon, was his teacher.

Today, Langdon is Cabell's school superintendent.

One of Mrs. Woodard's pupils was Nolan Fowler. Today he is a history professor at Tennessee Tech in Cookeville. Early McFann of Lesage says he remembers Fowler walking the five miles to Barboursville High School because he "wanted that education so much."

At 81, Mollie Meehling of 3450 Riverside Drive, Huntington, was the oldest former Nine Mile pupil at yesterday's reunion, which was at the Ohio River Road Volunteer Fire Department in Lesage.

Since the school had no library, Mrs. Woodard said she would go to the public library and get 25 or more books to bring back.

"Once I had put them in the box, the kids would run for them. They were only supposed to have them for one day but sometimes they hid them in their desks so they could have them for the next day."

Mrs. Langdon noted schools were much more a "community affair" then than today because the schools were small and located near the pupil's homes. She remembers hot lunches prepared by mothers during the 1930s.

Both women said their classrooms were like "a family," with close relationships developing between the teacher and her pupils. In those days, the boys sat on one side of the room and the girls on the other. Romance apparently waited until recess.

Mrs. Woodard said she originally wanted to be a nurse but got into teaching instead.

"To have your daughter be a schoolteacher was really great," she said.

She added she "wouldn't be happy" teaching today because discipline is such a problem. For reasons she's not quite sure of, Mrs. Langdon says "parents aren't as cooperative" now as when she was teaching.

Mrs. Woodard retired from Lincoln Elementary after 35 years service. Mrs. Langdon retired from Cox's Landing Elementary after 39 years service.

Newspaper article written by David Williamson
From The Herald Dispatch
Huntington, W. Va.
July 28, 1974

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