Copies of Tales Beyond Fried Rabbit  are now available for sale in the Chatham County Museum and through our web orders page.

Fred Vatter’s delightful saunter into some of the many corners of Chatham County’s past tell us of old houses, aged country stores, church yards with intriguing gravestones, and venerable public buildings; settlements and cemeteries now lost due to dams and other effects of progress; ordinary people who know the county’s past and would love to tell you about it, as well as prominent civic leaders now long dead.  Order Form

CCHA has pledged $25,000 to the Chatham Community Library to build and furnish an area in the new library devoted to county history, heritage and genealogy. Details

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A Brief History of the Schools
 of Chatham County
by Jane Pyle

Tarpin Slide School

Just what were the country schools like . . . 70 years ago [1820]? The first one I attended was a small one-room schoolhouse—so small, in fact, that as I look at a picture of it now I hardly see how 30 or 40 students squeezed into it each day. . .  Mostly we were taught spelling and the Three R’s . . . There were no “grades” and the same pupil might be studying at the same time subjects that would now be taught in the third, fifth, and eighth grades. . .

 -Dr. Clarence Poe,
My First Eighty Years  

Schools of Chatham County

The history of education in Chatham County is covered in considerable detail in Chatham County, 1771-1971, starting with private academies and ending just before integration of the public schools. This article is intended to be an overview of the subject, illustrated with photographs from scattered sources, and covers much the same period of time.  

Academies and Early Public Schools

Roy E. Cole, in an article published in the Chatham Record of 2 June 1922 entitled “A Chatham Education,” remarks, “An academy in our pioneer days of education answered for the same purpose that a high school does today.” Chatham’s first and best-known academy was the Pittsborough Academy, established by state charter in 1787, with the name persisting into the twentieth century. Other academies were begun at Haywood (1818), Rock Rest (1828, moved to Pittsborough in 1831 and called Kelvin), Tick Creek (1832, later Caldwell), Pleasant Hill (1838), and Cobia’s Select Female School (1839) near Pittsboro.

Public education in Chatham County began in 1839 with a local vote approving the recently-enacted common school law and setting up thirty-five districts. Public or common schools typically had one teacher, met for only five months, and taught only the three Rs. The number of districts increased, and by 1864 there were 65 school committees; however, after the Civil War most schools closed and in 1870 a report told of only two or three schools with twenty teachers examined by the county board. Oral tradition says that the first African-American school may have been started as early as 1853; the first deed recorded for a non-white school was in 1869, for Haywood. A dual system of districts was established and 48 white and 24 Negro schools were reported in 1873.

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