TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF MEMORIES
FRANKLIN ACADEMY ALUMNI RECALL EXPERIENCES AT STATE’S FIRST PUBLIC SCHOOL
Dena Bradford wasn’t ready to go.
For the first few weeks of first grade at Franklin Academy in the fall of 1970, Bradford — scared about leaving the company of her mother — sat on the steps outside the school and cried.
“Dena,” Bradford’s mom reassured her, “you have to go to school.”
Reluctantly, Bradford went. In her first-grade class, teacher Allene Sanders soon took Bradford under her wing. Bradford got attached.
“From then on, I absolutely loved my six years here,” Bradford said.
The experience she got from teachers like Sanders, third-grade teacher Ann Richardson and fourth-grade teacher Elizabeth Downer made Bradford realize, ultimately, what she wanted to do.
“I give them credit for what I am today,” Bradford said. “I always wanted to be a teacher because I wanted to influence children the way they influenced me.”
In her time in the Columbus Municipal School District, the Cleveland School District, Delta State University and the Aberdeen School District, Bradford has served in varying capacities. She has taught first through third grade, taught reading to seventh- and eighth-graders and served as a librarian. Now, she’s in her fourth year manning the library at Franklin, evoking old memories with every day she spends at the school.
“I started my school career here, and if the good Lord’s willing, I will end my teaching career here,” she said.
In the 200 years since Franklin — the first public school in Mississippi — was established, there are plenty of stories like Bradford’s. The school held its bicentennial celebration on February 12, and alumni shared their remembrances of their time at what Bradford called a “pillar for education” in Columbus.
“It’s still a beautiful school, I think,” said Betty Thornbrough, who attended Franklin from 1939 to 1945. “To know that it has been here all those years, it’s wonderful.”
Like Bradford, Thornbrough did her best to avoid attending school at first. She “mysteriously” got sick time and time again, making her mother come pick her up and take her home. Eventually, Mom caught on.
“She swatted my rear end, put me out in front of the school and told me to go inside,” Thornbrough said. “I never had that mysterious illness again.”
She said she recalled square dancing in the auditorium upstairs, playing in the Magnolia Bowl during recess and getting jealous that her friend’s first-grade class across the hall had instruments for a small band while hers didn’t.
Emanuel Walden, who attended fifth and sixth grade at Franklin from 1974-76 (the same years as Bradford), credited the school for the academic benefits it gave him. He had previously gone to West Lowndes Elementary but found himself behind when he got to Franklin. When he went on to Motley afterward, Walden said he felt ahead of the game.
“It really set me up as far as the rest of my life because it was a really good school,” he said.
IN THE CRADLE
Columbus Municipal School District Superintendent Cherie Labat said the experience Walden got at Franklin continues to be the ideal as Franklin Academy prepares for the 200 years to come.
“It’s an institution we want to make sure the community is proud of, and we’ll continue to focus on not only the structural but the academic achievement of Franklin Academy and the district as a whole,” Labat said.
That means continuing with the capital improvement plan for the current Franklin building, which opened in 1939. Electrical repairs made by the Tennessee Valley Authority prior to the February 12 bicentennial event were part of maintaining and upgrading the grounds of the historic school.
“This is the cradle of public education,” Labat said. “It’s where it started.”
A HISTORIC PAST
Originally, Franklin began as an unsealed 20-by-30-foot building completed in December 1821. In 1835, two buildings were erected with a wall between them — one structure for males, one for females.
Curriculum comprised spelling, reading, writing, English grammar, geography, arithmetic, Latin, Greek and mathematics. School ran from 7:30 a.m. to an hour before sunset with a two-hour lunch, and students got two weeks of vacation in July and two in December.
In 1877, Union Academy, a school for African American children created after the Civil War, became a branch of Franklin Academy. Labat noted that her education as a Black woman wouldn’t have been the same as that of the students who attended Franklin prior to its integration in 1965.
“My experience as an African American would probably have been very different from another person’s experience 200 years ago,” she said. “Overall, the hope and aspiration of me becoming something better or more than what I wanted to be is the true essence of public education whether I was at Union Academy or I was at Franklin Academy.”
CENTURIES OF CHANGE
A lot else has changed in the past two centuries, Franklin’s alumni acknowledged.
When he was a student, Walden once spent hours drawing a tree in front of the school. The other day, he drove by to realize the tree had been cut down.
The Magnolia Bowl, where he, Bradford and Thornbrough used to spend their recess period, is overgrown. The Columbus High School football team hasn’t played at the structure since 1998.
Still, Bradford can’t help but remember Franklin as it was when she attended. Walking past a classroom, she’ll think, “That’s the room where I fell in love with reading” or, “That’s the room I got in trouble for talking too much.”
“Memories flood my mind all the time,” Bradford said. “You walk in and you still remember being in that play or being in that talent show.”
Bradford is two years away from retirement, and there’s no question where she intends to spend them: in her library on the second floor of the school she once was scared to enter.
“What a perfect place for me to end my teaching career: a place that I love dearly,” Bradford said.
STORY BY THEO DEROSA
PHOTOS OF DENA BRADFORD BY THEO DEROSA
BICENTENNIAL PHOTOS BY CHRIS JENKINS
