In October 1960, Ann McIntosh interviewed the faculty who served the Kingstree school in 1898. There were only two members of the faculty then, and both of them were still alive and in Kingstree sixty-two years later. The resulting story was published in The State on October 21. This is the article.
"Revered and respected, the entire faculty of the Kingstree school of 1898 still lives in Kingstree.
"The school stood on the site of the present Carnegie Library. Mrs. LeRoy Lee and Olin Epps taught all the grades from the first through high school. They were the faculty.
"'It was crowded, and we really had too many pupils. The next year, two teachers and two more rooms were added to the building, which in later years was torn down,' recalls Mr. Epps. NOTE: the two-room addition was torn down; however the original school building was bought by Dr. D.C. Scott and moved farther down Hampton Avenue, where it still stands today.
"'We got about $40 a month, and I saved about half of that,' he adds. 'There was no janitor, and we had to clean up our own rooms. I remember we only had one key to the building, and we had a place to hide the key. I absent-mindedly one afternoon put the key in my pocket and went home. When I came to school the next morning, there was Miss Riser standing outside in the cold. She was ready to break her umbrella over my head, and I wouldn't have blamed her.'
"Mrs. Lee was Miss Eva Riser when she came to Kingstree to teach in the school. She sat on the porch of her handsome, white-columned home on Academy Street and recalled that classroom of 62 years ago She taught the first few grades and French, English and Latin in the upper grades. All the children were together, and there were no definite grade distributions.
"'I gave Billy Britton his first spanking,' she remembers. Billy Britton was Kingstree's chief of police for over 25 years. The spanking, Mrs. Lee recalls, was 'for pulling Marion Gilland's pigtails.' The spanking must have "taken" Mrs. Lee figures, for he never got up nerve to hand her a parking ticket during the many years she drove around town in her celebrated car–a car she this spring quit driving due to doctor's orders. NOTE: Mrs. Lee was celebrated around Kingstree for her notoriously bad driving. I remember hearing many stories in my childhood about Mrs. Lee's driving.
"Mrs. Lee observed her 90th birthday on Thursday, June 30. She says she is the oldest person in Kingstree. She is still quite capable of chastising unruly children–and is well-known and respected by same. She lives across the street from her Williamsburg Presbyterian Church, attends services regularly, and keeps an interested eye on the comings and goings.
"A native of Newberry, daughter of a merchant and planter, the former Miss Riser was graduated from the old Female Academy of Newberry, conducted by Capt. A.P. Pifer of Virginia. In 1900, she married Mr. Lee, an attorney, an organizer of the Kingstree Federal Savings and Loan Association, organizer and president of the Exchange Bank of Kingstree from 1932 until 1948. He died in 1949.
"Residing with Mrs. Lee now is an adopted daughter Miss Elsie Reynolds Lee. A graduate of Furman with a masters degree from the University of North Carolina, she formerly worked with the American Red Cross in Japan.
"Mr. Epps recalls that his teaching experience lasted from 1898 to 1899. He had attended a preparatory school in Spartanburg and graduated from Wofford College in 1897. Olin Epps was one of 14 children, five of whom are now over 80 years of age. He lives in a comfortable home on the Warsaw Road a few miles from Kingstree and still farms a part of his family's original landholdings. His wife is the former Mary Alice Frierson, who attended Lander College, and they have three children, Thomas Olin Epps, Jr., Mrs. Isabel Tompkins, both of Kingstree, and Julian Epps of Headland, AL.
"Olin Epps was Williamsburg County's first county agent. 'We didn't even have an office in those days,' he recalls, 'and only worked for about two days a week.'
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