When she attended Doe Creek School, Sue Maness remembers, she ate beans and corn bread for lunch and waited excitedly for recess. She also attended Sunday services in the one-room schoolhouse, which doubled as Doe Creek Church. "We didn't have snow days. The only holiday we had off was Christmas, and we toted water up to the school. I have good memories here," Maness, 73, said as she walked her stomping grounds. She pointed out where the dirt basketball court, outhouses and cookhouse used to be. Standing outside the building that once looked so large to her, Maness stared at its rusted metal roof and buckled wood floors.

Residents of this community, near Scotts Hill on the Henderson-Decatur county line in West Tennessee, attended Doe Creek School and Church from 1865 to 1956. The 24-foot-by-30-foot log building still stands next to the cemetery on Doe Creek Road, though without its original doors and windows. The old one-room school house is now getting spruced up. Workers are dismantling the original building and reusing the salvageable materials to rebuild it. If all goes as planned, they could complete the first phase of restoration by late summer. The Doe Creek Restoration Committee wants to bring the building back to its original glory. To do so will cost about $93,000, but inmates from a nearby prison in Clifton will provide the labor. That leaves the committee with out-of-pocket costs of $20,000 for materials and lunch for the inmates.

The seven members of the restoration committee, most of whom have an ancestral connection to the building, have been raising funds to restore it. Committee members want the building to look almost exactly the way it did when students and churchgoers filled its seats. But they also plan to include an iron fence and bright lighting, said Gale Swift, a member of the committee who has relatives buried in the cemetery. Tracy Averett will donate his labor in honor of his great-grandfather, Elmer Duck, head of the school for several years.

"We need a lot of help out here, and any kind of help will be appreciated," Averett said. The coed school taught first- through eighth-graders. Maness, who walked nearly a mile to get to the school each day, considers it her home. To keep the building standing, volunteers have placed support beams at its weak areas. Families also have been working to maintain the cemetery where relatives are buried. The committee also has asked that the building and cemetery be added to the National Register of Historic Places. Committee members refer to Doe Creek School as the only one-room schoolhouse in the state, but according to the Web site See-Tennessee.com, East Tennessee is home to the state's oldest one-room log schoolhouse, known as the Sam Houston Schoolhouse.

Scotts Hill Mayor Carey Johnson believes restoring Doe Creek School will be an advantage for the area. "The Board of Aldermen went on record supporting the restoration entirely," said Johnson, whose father had been a guest minister at Doe Creek Church. The group hopes the distinction of being put on a national registry will drum up tourism and support for the city, which has about 900 residents. For Betty Hughes, another committee member, the work is more personal. She has devoted herself to the restoration project in memory of her father, who attended there. "I've known about Doe Creek all my life," Hughes said. "I have a love of history, and if my father was here, he'd be involved in this."

Listed below are the people you can contact
if you want to give of your services, time or money.

Freddie Kennedy 2420 Doe Creek Rd. Sardis TN 38371 (731-549-9698) J. Wayne Stanfill 20 Hughes Rd. Scotts Hill TN 38374 (731-549-3350) Jerry Taylor 4541 Hwy 100 W. Decaturville TN 38329 (731-549-9644)

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