Truckin' on the Western Branch

down. Ninety years later Juliet Ballard Hawks remembered attending the four room school as a second grader in 1914 and later starting high school there. She remembered that there were usually fewer than 20 students in the entire high school and that the school still had outside privies, an outdoor hand pump for water, and potbellied stoves in the classrooms. “Our high school facility was one big room with a sliding partition to divide it into two and more classes in the principal’s office,” she said. “The high school back then did have a boys and a girls basketball team—no gym, just a dirt court.” Early in the 1900s, the Churchland schools also served students from what is now Western Branch, some western sections of Portsmouth, and parts of Nansemond County. Some remember that students stopped using horse and buggy to get to school about 1918 when automobiles became more affordable. Students as young as 12 drove to school from outlying farms. In 1922 a new three-story brick Churchland School, first to eleventh grades with a third-floor auditorium, opened between the old four-room school and the Grange Hall. (The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry was founded in

1867 as a national fraternal organization, with rituals similar to Freemasonry and advocated for the agricultural community.) There were no hotels in the area in the early 1900s, so the Deans family on Hoffler Creek rented rooms in their 17-room farmhouse to the bricklayers who worked on the new school. Gracie Lee VanDyck started her teaching career at Churchland High in 1947 and coached girls’ basketball and softball. The school was friendly, she said; no one brought a weapon into the school, and the teachers were respected by parents and students.

Churchland High School, High Street, painting by J. Robert Burnell

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