Monday, January 16, 2023 Having computer issues today. The issue is my computer will not power on. Therefore, this week’s blog post will be delayed!
New local history stories each Monday.
An article written in the August 5, 1917 issue of the Atlanta Constitution praises the efforts of Cross Roads School in Sandy Springs and the recent Farmer’s Institute which was held in that community. The article is titled “Club Kids Are Doing Their Bit for World Democracy.”
The Cross Roads Girls Canning Club and the Boys Pig and Corn clubs of Sandy Springs were present at the event. It is noted that farming and keeping up food production will help the war effort. The United States has entered World War I just four months earlier.
According to Lois Coogle’s book “ Sandy Springs Past Tense,” Cross Roads School was located just southwest of the Cross Roads Primitive Baptist Church. The location is where today Mount Vernon Highway, Dupree Road and Old Powers Ferry Road come together. The school began as a brush arbor school in the 1880s and later was a one room school house. By 1910, it was a two room school.
Teacher Annie Houze Cook was at the 1917 event. Cook gives her all the credit to the work of the children, saying she only guided and encouraged them. However, author Nell Freeman proclaims, “But all the children and everybody else in those parts proclaim emphatically that Mrs. Cook is more modest than exact, and you feel sure that they are right in this.”
The Cross Roads Girl’s Canning Club had seven members. They wore pink and blue uniforms with white aprons. The girls started out with okra, corn, and tomatoes, cooked it on an oil stove and poured it into large jars. The jars were sealed with wax and rubber. It seems a rather dangerous process for young children.
The president of the group was student Myrtice Lay, who is described as a first-class farmer. She won first prize for general gardening at the Southeastern Fair in 1916.
The boys of the school exhibited the pigs they had raised. Two Duroc-Jersey pigs were shown by Knox and Pink Barrow of Dunwoody. The four month old pigs weighed 130 and 135 pounds. Pink’s father tells how the boys treat their pigs like family.
T. G. Chastain and assistant Carl Wallace were the students who started the club and kept it going.
In her book, Lois Coogle also mentions Lillie Hyman in the summer of 1914, working for superintendent of schools Edwin C. Merry, and visiting schools such as Cross Roads to make sure all the most up-to-date canning methods were being taught.
Annie Houze Cook went on to teach for many years at Hammond School in Sandy Springs and later she began her own kindergarten program at the Providence Baptist Church in Sandy Springs.
Another teacher of Cross Roads School was Ida Williams who later taught at the R. J. Guinn School.