| A Word Edgewise by Mary Joe Clendenin |
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| A Word Edgewise by Mary Joe Clendenin |
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Last Updated 01/20/06
HICKEY SCHOOL BEING RENOVATED
The old Hickey school house, nestled in a grove of ancient live oaks, which probably shaded it as a brave new building in 1874, may be the oldest school building in Erath County. The story of the little building began in 1849 when a young man named Wesley W. Hickey left his family in frontier country Texas, with his wife's parents, while he went to California to seek fortune enough to keep his beautiful young wife in a custom he wished for her.
Wesley had been a frontiersman in Tennessee and an Indian fighter before he came to Texas, according to the Hickey Pioneers, by Dieletta Watson, granddaughter of Captain Wesley. He was well trained in the ability to travel in hostile areas and live off the land. By himself, he quietly made his way by horseback to California, surviving the many hardships along the way that others did not. There, just as unobtrusively, he panned for gold. He collected what he though was sufficient and made his way back to Texas where he deposited the money from his gold. He bought land near Stephenville, some outside Dublin, more property in Stephenville and further east, then began farming, all without advertising his wealth.
The Hickey community and his farm were in what is now the Lone Oak community. With his family increasing and neighbors moving in, Captain Hickey saw the need of a school. Lumber was hauled by wagon from Ft. Worth for the one-room school, which Hickey said could be used as a church as long as it did not interfere with school, according to Earnestine Goodman in a report about a reunion in 1965.
My dad, Joe Fitzgerald, one of the early students at Hickey, would have testified that preaching did interfere. He wrote, "I remember one summer they had church and school both in the same house. The teacher would teach until about eleven, then the people would come in and the preacher would preach until about one. Those were irksome times for a boy. The kids had to sit on the old benches so long that they wore corns on the benches."
Lula Stanford showed me the repair and re-construction her son has been doing to the old building which they hope will soon be useful once again as a community center. It served as a school until 1917 when Hickey and Johnson were consolidated with the bigger, three-room school of Lone Oak, and continued to serve as a church for many years after that.
Lula Stanford's son Marvin has repaired the floor, put in windows and doors, secured braces and cables to keep the walls in line, cleared brush from the yard, put up gates, and done many other things to revive the building and grounds. He moved his own wood stove in so that he could work while it was cold this winter.
Marvin, with less than $400 of donated money which has gone for supplies and a little help for the heaviest job, has donated his time and skill to the task which he considers a work for God. He is dedicated to making the center more than pleasant memories for some former residents of the area. A neighbor across the road, one who grows tomatoes, has promised to help paint the building this summer.
Marvin remembers going to church at Hickey as a youngster. He remembers his mother's and father's conversion there in 1939 when he was four years old. Lafe Smallwood, whose father Bob Smallwood had been pastor of the church for 45 years, was the preacher at the time Lula and Naylor Stanford made their confession. Later, they were taken to the McDow Hole on Greens Creek (the ghost of Jenny may have been a witness) and were baptized.
All the old timers who actually went to school at Hickey are gone, and the old benches are things of the past--maybe the corns got too painful--but the sense of community and friendship abides.