Lessons Learned : The Story of Pilot Mountain School

Pilot Mountain School, located in southern Burke County, North Carolina, was built in 1942 as a WPA project. It served the community as a first- through eighth-grade school until 1970 when it became a junior high school. The school was closed in 1973 during a restructuring and consolidation of the school system. The building was sold at public auction and had a series of owners, falling into a state of disrepair before being bought and refurbished by Tom Brittain. The former school now houses a café, banquet and event facilities, and numerous shops once again serving the community for which it was built.

As author Gretchen Griffith says in her preface to Lessons Learned:

Tom Brittain bought a schoolhouse. He was tossing the clutter and peeling the splinters and thinking of future possibilities when the phenomena started.
The locals dropped by. They'd point to a corner and say, That's where..., or toward the principal s office and say, That's when.... Tom Brittain would strip away another layer, and the locals would say, That's how.... When the schoolhouse was exposed to the bare bones, the locals finally said, That's why.... So Tom Brittain called for a story catcher me.

Through countless interviews conducted in person, by phone, through the mail and email, Gretchen has captured the combined spirit of independence and community shared by the residents of Pilot Mountain. The memories recorded in Lessons Learned vary widely in their tone from happy to sad, from embarrassed to proud. They are the recollections of community members, school staff and faculty, and, perhaps most importantly, the children who grew up attending Pilot Mountain School. The thread that runs through all of these remembrances is a sense that the school did more than teach the facts found in books; it nourished the soul and provided a firm foundation for all who passed through its doors.

Gretchen has woven these interviews throughout a well-researched history illustrated with over 120 photographs and drawings. Her history of Pilot Mountain School recalls the hardships and sorrows of the 1940s, the recovery and advances of the 1950s, and the social upheavals of the sixties and seventies. Pilot Mountain School escaped the fate of so many of its contemporaries that were demolished to make way for progress or left to collapse through neglect. It continues to nurture the community as it did when it educated their children.

Author Gretchen Griffith has been instrumental in preserving local stories through several oral history projects. Her collection of interviews with citizens in Gamewell, a small community in western North Carolina, is on file in the town hall. In addition, she researched, collected stories, and wrote the script for the recordings on the self-guided tour available at Lingle School, an 1800s era schoolhouse that has been restored and is open to the public at Tuttle State Forest in Caldwell County, North Carolina.
Her undergraduate degree from Appalachian State University is in elementary education with a concentration in Spanish. She spent her graduate year as a teaching assistant in the reading department and as a clerical assistant to the children s literature professor. Her master s degree from Appalachian is in remedial reading.
She is a retired teacher with thirty years experience covering multiple levels from Head Start five year olds to college freshman at Appalachian, adult basic education and high school equivalency at Caldwell Community College, elementary and middle school grades, and remedial reading in all grades. After her retirement, she taught at Caldwell Community College.
In the late 1990s, her fourth-grade class participated in a pilot program for the Community Music Curriculum project through an NEA grant and the University of North Carolina. Through one element of this program, identifying community music through its oral history, Ms. Griffith taught interviewing skills and techniques to her students, who in turn interviewed their parents and grandparents. She then became supervisor for the program in the western counties of the state and worked with teachers to develop their own Community Music Curriculum and to teach their students how to search in the community for music-related stories.
Ms. Griffith s nonfiction article Finding Forty-two was published February 2010 in Highlights for Children. She is a member of SCBWI, a professional organization for writers of children s books. She has published curriculum-related materials both on the local level in Caldwell County and through the Community Music Curriculum program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She developed the teachers guide for the 1990 video The Battle of King s Mountain and the Overmountain Men by Edith F. Carter.
She lives in Lenoir, North Carolina, with her husband, frequently visiting her son's family in Gastonia and infrequently her daughter's in Taos, New Mexico.