Sanderson School once called ‘finest of county’

Edna Taylor spent only one year at Louie Sanderson School in St. Elmo in the 1920s, but it’s a year she won’t forget.

Living across from the school, always hanging around it and already acquainted with the principal, she was invited to start first grade there at age 5.

“They said, ‘You might as well be in school,’” said Ms. Taylor, 85, a Rossville resident.

The elementary, which was located at the corner of 37th Street and St. Elmo Avenue and which closed after the 1967-1968 school year, traced its origins to a two-room frame building in 1885.

First known as 17th District School, it was renamed North St. Elmo School around 1914, then Louie Sanderson School following the area’s annexation into Chattanooga in 1929.

A two-story brick building with a stone foundation was completed in 1910 and remained the school’s home until it closed.

The building, according to a 1910 Chattanooga Times story, was “constructed of the finest pressed white brick at a cost of over $20,000.”

It was, the newspaper report said, the “finest grammar school building of the county.”

The school’s windows, according to a newspaper story, had views of Lookout Mountain on the west and Missionary Ridge on the east.

Louie Sanderson, at the time the school was named after her, had been principal there for 12 years and a teacher there for 24 years.

“We loved Mrs. Sanderson so much,” Ms. Taylor said.

She also liked her first-grade teacher, Blanche Black, but she remembered how once she had “acted up” and her teacher had put her in the cloakroom.

However, the cloakroom opened onto a long hallway, and Ms. Taylor snuck out and went to the cafeteria to attempt to buy something.

“(Ms. Black) caught me and made me sit in the corner,” she said.

Ms. Taylor also remembered when a radiator burst in one class and sent water across the floor, and she recalled playing a song about a hummingbird at a piano recital at the school.

Mrs. Sanderson, who lived behind the school, died after the 1928-1929 school year, Ms. Taylor said, and the new principal refused to let her start second grade there since she was only 6.

“We were scared to death of him,” Ms. Taylor said. “None of us liked him.”

As it turned out, her family moved to Lakeview and she went to school there.

Roberta B. Oglesby of Chatta-

ga was the school’s last librarian, splitting her time there in an itinerant capacity with Calvin Donaldson and Charles A. Bell Elementary schools during the 1967-68 year.

“It was a fairly nice looking school,” she said. “I think the library was on the second floor.”

Mrs. Oglesby, who later served as librarian at Riverside and Howard High schools, said that when elementary school closed it was quite, with one teacher per grade.

After it closed, the school was used to house a Head Start program.

“It was nice,” said Inez K. Bruce, a member of the office staff during the school’s final year and mother of three boys who attended there. “But they said there were too many steps for little bitty first and second graders.”

The school building was later torn down and the hill behind it razed, Ms. Taylor said. As a child, she said, she used to sit on the hill with some of her friends overlooking a little swampy area and listen to frogs.

“None of that is there,” she said. “I was disappointed when I found out (the school and the hill) were gone.”

A Bank of America branch now occupies the site where the school sat.