Name/Title
Bain School circa 1950Description
The majority of the students at Bain School came from farm families and were the primary source of labor for their parents, and the demands of farm life often took its toll on their education. The school employed a full time Agriculture and Shop teacher. In “Ag” classes, boys learned about crops, soil improvement, animal husbandry, dairying and woodworking. Hamilton Yates Phillips remembers an experience in “Ag” class - a field trip to Morrocroft (Cameron Morrison’s farm) to judge cattle.
Through the end of the 1940s, Bain School followed a schedule that corresponded to the exigencies of rural life. The summer recess lasted only four weeks, through June, and classes recommenced in July and ran through the end of August. The cotton opened at the end of August, and the school closed for five weeks to accommodate the cotton harvest. School then resumed for the fall term in October. This kind of scheduling ended in 1948, the year that Hamilton Phillips graduated. Out of Hamilton Phillips’s class of forty, only eighteen graduated. Content by P.M. Stathakis, January, 1993
