PHOTO BY CAROL MAHLER

Charlotte Patricia Hill Carter with her daughter Ramona Carter Gollman. Gollman enjoyed her mother’s presentation about Smith-Brown School to the DeSoto County Historical Society last Thursday. Carter gave a brief history of the school and then shared her memories. In her senior year, she was “Miss Smith-Brown” and the salutatorian of the class of 1958. After she graduated from college, married, and had children, she returned to Smith-Brown to teach.

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The Smith-Brown School’s Trojan Band wore the school colors: green jackets and white pants. If they had been invited by the other school’s band director, they traveled to other cities to play for football games. Mrs. Grear, the band director, taught Carter how to read music, and she learned the difficult solo to the “Washington Post March” by John Phillips Sousa. In her junior and senior years, she played “guard” for the girls basketball team.

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The Smith-Brown School on Orange Avenue was an open rectangle. The elementary school classes were on one side; the high school classes on the other. In the front was the library and the principal’s office. Because the school did not have an auditorium, the courtyard was used for dances, meetings, and other events. “We loved that inner courtyard,” Carter said. “It was most important to us.”

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Carter’s sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Martin, had lived in Kentucky, so each child in her class had a pen pal. The class decided to send a box of items that children in Kentucky probably didn’t know about, such as oranges, grapefruits, and seashells. They returned a box of treasures unique to their state. Carter also remembers that every May Day, students danced around the Maypole: “each class did a different dance -- square dance, polka, waltz” and so forth.

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The New Homemakers of America work on landscaping in front of the Smith-Brown School. They demonstrate the Smith-Brown “can do, will do” spirit. NHA was a club similar to, but segregated from, the Future Homemakers of America. In 1965, they merged, and in 1999, the group voted to change their name to Family, Career and Community Leaders of America.