The Falling Water community in 1959.
Mark KennedyResidents of the Falling Water community can tell by your smell if you are from Signal Mountain. It's not your body odor, but the smell coming from your car brakes.
The morning air in the little Falling Water community has the acrid smell of scorched brake pads straining against the steep grades of Roberts Mill Road, which plunges down the side of Walden's Ridge.
For mountaintop residents who live in Signal Mountain, Walden, and unincorporated areas of Walden's Ridge, Falling Water is that little cluster of farm properties at the foot of the mountain they whiz through on their way to work or play.
Some of the Falling Water old-timers remember when Roberts Mill Road was just a dirt path, and people thought little of hiking up and down the mountain. In many ways, Falling Water in the early decades of the 21st century is a land that time forgot, a small rural community surrounded by - some might say choked by - urban sprawl.
"Back in the '30s and '40s, everybody who lived in Falling Water were kin," says Bud Moody, who started at Falling Water School in 1936.
It's always been an insular place. Stanley Jackson, a 1944 graduate of the community school, remembers some of the residents of Falling Water resisted electrification because they didn't want to allow power poles to be planted on their farmland.
Located just outside the southwestern tip of Soddy-Daisy proper, much of the land in Falling Water is in the unincorporated area of Hamilton County. It's sparsely developed, with few of the subdivisions and convenience stores that dot the nearby bedroom communities. In many ways it's characteristic of a late 19th-century farming community, a creek-bottom constellation of family farms orbiting several small community churches.
Falling Water has been in the news lately. As reported by Kendi Anderson in the Sunday Times Free Press, the 200-student Falling Water Elementary School (K-5) is slated to close next month, ending a century-old tradition. Back in 1912, the students at Falling Water school wrote an anthem of sorts that ended with the line: "For we will fight with all our might, our school will never fail."
But alas, progress is an irresistible force. Economies of scale have forced Hamilton County school leaders to build a 1,000-student elementary school in the nearby Ganns-Middle Valley area that will absorb some of the former Falling Water students next fall.
For residents of Falling Water, the closing of their community school feels like the end of something important; an inflection point that may eventually lead to the piecemeal dismantling of their ancestral properties as older landowners die off.
In a recent gathering at Falling Water Baptist Church, residents explained that their community has always been a self-sufficient place. Descendants of the original founding families - the Jacksons, Johnsons, Selcers and Barkers - remember their forebears telling stories about Civil War soldiers stealing milk and butter from the farms.
Some of the families can point to five generations who attended Falling Water school, which started as a two-room schoolhouse with a dirt floor and no indoor plumbing.
"I hate to see the little children go to a bigger school," said Mary Lynn Jackson, who attended Falling Water school in the 1940s and whose great-grandson, Josh, is a first-grader there now.
View other columns by Mark Kennedy
Former Hamilton County Commissioner Fred Skillern was a powerful advocate for Falling Water school, and residents there believe he forestalled its closure, an idea that had been floated as far back as the 1990s. Still, even though there is a sense of inevitability now among the residents about the closing, it doesn't take away the sting of losing their landmark.
"It's a family environment," says Ruth Baker, who served as school secretary for 33 years. "The kids knew all of the teachers and the teachers knew all of the kids."
Even though many students come from Mowbray Mountain and nearby Soddy-Daisy subdivisions, the closing will be mourned by the community. For 100-plus years, the little school gave the children of Falling Water's founding families both roots and wings.
In the words of the Falling Water anthem: "When the waters flow from the mountain side, and it sparkles with delight. You will find a school that is loved by all, for it stands for truth and right."
For some, the sound of those school walls being demolished some day will be almost more than they can bear.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.