The WPA Builds: Big Rock School, Breathitt County, Kentucky

Public education has a long and turbulent history in Kentucky. The reforms of the late 20th century followed efforts in the 19th century to provide access to education to children, with the most pressing need often being decent school buildings. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) provided sturdy, well-built school buildings to many counties across Kentucky in the 1930s and 1940s, many of them located in remote, rural parts of the state.

Big Rock School, Breathitt County, Kentucky.

In the decades before World War II, Breathitt County certainly qualified as rural and inaccessible, although the Big Rock School, built by the WPA in 1936-37, is only a little over two miles (as the crow flies) from Jackson, the county seat.

Section of the 1951 USGS topographic map showing the Big Rock School in relation to Jackson, the county seat.

Variously described as a three-room or five-room school in the Goodman Paxton Photographic Collection at the University of Kentucky, the native stone school was a huge improvement from earlier school buildings.

Built upon a raised basement, the building has the shape of a “T,” with a a large projecting front gable containing a bank of double-hung windows, and plain entrances via a long line of stone steps set to either side, on the side gable wings of the building. It is a simple structure, but one that conveys solidity and with the warmth of the stone, a sense of security.

The facade and side elevation of Big Rock School, November 2015.

In 1940, noted photographer Marion Post Wolcott visited Breathitt County and photographed the Big Rock School. Wolcott noted that it had been built since Mrs. Marie R. Turner had been Breathitt County school superintendent, and that Turner was “trying to consolidate all the schools and build them of stone since so many of the mountain schools have been burned down several times.”

Marion Post Wolcott’s 1940 photo of the Big Rock school.

A few years after Wolcott and her camera captured images of Eastern Kentucky, there were 98 grade schools in Breathitt County – over half only accessible by horse or by foot.

This image, also from the Goodman Paxton Photographic Collection (date unknown), is labeled simply as “log schoolhouse still in use in Breathitt County.”

Even though the Big Rock School, with its solid stone walls and ample natural light, was among the most modern of school buildings in the county in 1947, it too suffered from a lack of resources.

During Rural Education Week in 1947, the Louisville Courier-Journal profiled the “education despite obstacles” in the Breathitt County school system.

Image from the October 19, 1947 edition of the Louisville Courier Journal.

The county lacked the funds to provide lunch for the students, so fundraisers, including “pie suppers” provided the resources to purchase cooking supplies. The kitchen, however, was not quite up to the task of providing a daily hot meal.

The cooks at Big Rock School commented in the news article that “it is a miracle we are able to cook anything  at all on this stove.”

The Big Rock School under construction, 1936-37. Image from the Goodman Paxton Collection at the University of Kentucky.

Despite challenges including long walks to reach a school bus (3-6 miles was common) and old-fashioned wood stoves, the Big Rock School operated until 1970, when the school closed and the students were transferred to the new LBJ elementary school in Jackson.

Less than three years after closing, the building was sold, and additions to either side transformed the WPA school into an eight-unit apartment building. I don’t know when the additions were removed, but on the overcast day I visited, the school sat alone (save for a mobile home in close proximity), hills rising up behind its sheltered location. Some windows had been boarded over, and while the metal roof showed some weathering, it appeared sound.

I’m not sure if adaptive reuse figures into the future of the Big Rock School – but when I consider the craftsmanship of the stone building, and think of the history it represents – I hope it will survive and remain standing.