Three
Mile
School

Three Mile School

Three Mile School served as the center of educational and social life for Freed and the surrounding countryside of Calhoun County, West Virginia, from the 1850s to the 1950s. This site focuses on Three Mile School in the 1930s. Many of its pupils from that decade were scattered by the Depression and World War II. That generation made its mark on the wider world with tools it picked up as boys and girls in a white frame building set in the mouth of School House Hollow along Three Mile Run.

Civilian Conservation Corps workers rebuilt the Three Mile School building in the summer of 1935. They turned the building ninety degrees, installed smaller windows, and partitioned part of the interior to create a cloakroom and a school library, a rare feature in country schools.

Miss Louie Dawson began teaching at Three Mile School in the fall of 1934. She taught her younger sisters and the children who lived along the creeks and up the hollows she had known all her life. The pictures and text that accompany this page give glimpses into a community of people whose lives connected in many ways. Miss Dawson became Mrs. Snider in 1936 when she married Bernard Snider of Freed. By 1937 the county school board had moved her to another area school. Her memories and snapshots give shape to this site.

If you point your car up the gravel road with a grass strip down the middle that winds along Three Mile Run today, you'll find weed-choked Schoolhouse Hollow a short distance on the right. Some cut sandstone blocks in the edge of the lane mark the entrance to the schoolyard. The slab that served as the school porch and the chimney of the cookhouse stand farther back in the undergrowth. Four maple trees along the schoolyard stream testify to long ago Arbor Day ovservances.