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Clearmont woman remembers Hickory Grove School 75 years later
MARYVILLE, Mo. --Looking back 75 years ago, Audria Humphrey feels it’s surreal the Hickory Grove School she attended in the 1940s, is still preserved today.
The one-room Hickory Grove School was built for $70 in 1883 by William Allen. The schoolhouse was located 16 miles from Maryville, in Clearmont, Missouri.
Humphrey lived a mile and a half from the school, walking to school each day with her two siblings. Along the way, they met up with three other students up the road who shared the rest of the walk with them. This group of six students made up the entirety of the Hickory Grove students.
Humphrey said there was a stove in the middle of the of the building that would keep them warm.
“I remember the big stove in the middle of the building that heated us,” Humphrey said. “The younger kids got to sit closer to the stove than the older kids. I was one of the younger kids.”
Humphrey said sometimes her teacher, Laura Pence, would make soup for them during the winter.
“Once in a while in the winter, the teacher would make vegetable soup and she would set it on the stove to keep it hot,” Humphrey said. “You smelled that all morning while you were studying. Come noon, we thought we really had a meal.”
After the school was closed in 1946, the Nodaway County Historical Society moved the schoolhouse to Northwest Missouri State University in 1968. Former Northwest President Robert Foster dedicated the school on June 13, 1970. The schoolhouse had renovations done while it was on campus.
Margaret Kelley with the Nodaway County Historical Society said teachers at the time felt it was important for the Hickory Grove School to be placed on campus so future generations could know what it was like.
“The reason that all these teachers worked to get it (schoolhouse) on campus is they’d all taught in country schools,” Kelley said. “They (teachers) were afraid the next generations weren’t going to know what the kids had to go through in country schools, because all the country schools had closed by 1950ish.”
Kelley said there is history behind the Hickory Grove School and other generations needed to know about it.
“Nobody was left around that attended country schools,” Kelly said. “These teachers believed it was a culture thing and a history thing and they wanted to be sure that the next generation knew about them.”
Cathy Palmer with the Nodaway County Historical Society said teachers in the area felt strongly that the condition of the school needed to be maintained going into the future.
“Instead of teaching, (Northwest) had a project where they were training rural school teachers, so they set their classrooms up as individual rural schools and would teach all ages,” Palmer said. “It was kind of a combination of honoring that time period.”
Humphrey said it’s very special to her that her school is still in existence and has been kept up so well over the years.
“I just feel really good that my first grade school is preserved. I have such good memories of it,” Humphrey said. “You know it’s special (when) it’s still in existence. There’s only one other one-room schoolhouse that I know of that’s still in useable condition around here.”
The Little Red Schoolhouse in Clearmont, Missouri is the other local schoolhouse that is still in useable condition today.
The Hickory Grove School has been added to the National Register of Historic Places and currently sits on the property of the Nodaway County Historical Society Museum in Maryville, Missouri.
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