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The front of the marker bears the image of a drawing of the school that was done by Pat Bailey.
Times-News
Robby Nelms/The Times-News
Reminiscing about one-room school houses conjures up thoughts of our older relatives walking to school in the snow, uphill both ways, just to get to school and warm up by the pot-belly stove.
Now, we all know, that isn’t exactly how it was, but the one-room school house was real and relevant here in Alamance County. The Bethel Schoolhouse was one of the oldest in the area. And while the building has dissipated into history, its legacy lives on.
This Saturday at 3 p.m., the community of Snow Camp will celebrate the legacy of Bethel Schoolhouse and dedicate a marker. Bethel United Methodist Church, the Bethel Historical Society and cousins Patsy Bailey Allard and Susan Gross have put together an event to educate and commemorate what the schoolhouse meant to the community.
The Bethel Schoolhouse, later known as Bethel Academy, began educating students in 1858 with an enrollment of 63 students, Allard said.
"Bethel Academy was a well-rounded school, even employing teachers specializing in different forms of music,” she said.
The school operated with around 50 students per year until 1931, when the students were split between Sylvian School and Eli Whitney. The school closed between 1861 and 1871 due to the Civil War.
A birdhouse painted to look like a one-room school also sits on the monument site.
Times-News
Robby Nelms/The Times-News
Bethel Academy operated at five locations over the years, according to Allard and Gross, descendants of Robert Shaw, who initially sold the property for the schoolhouse. In 1931, the Shaw family reacquired the schoolhouse and land.
Over the years, the schoolhouse and the land surrounding it “basically became a trash dump,” Gross said.
Pat Bailey, Allard’s mother and a former freelancer for The Times-News, deeply cared about the history of the schoolhouse and its significance to the area. Her son, Ryan, cleaned the area, paving the way for a park, as his Eagle Scout project. Bailey later worked with the state to get a marker for the site.
After Bailey passed away in 2014, in lieu of flowers, the family asked for donations to keep up the park. Those donations, along with help from the church, historical society and community, went toward a monument honoring the school. Her drawing of the school adorns the front of the monument.
Saturday’s dedication will be at Bethel United Methodist Church at 3 p.m.,and will be headlined by a ribbon-cutting by Helen Shaw Gross, the eldest living descendant of Robert Shaw.
Allard noted, “We are going to put on an interactive skit to show what school-life was like for the students of Bethel Academy.”
There will also be artifacts from the site and time period, and people can search through the records of the school and trace their own histories if their relatives were educated there.
