Decaturville school history spans county founding, consolidation and growth

Decaturville’s school map still traces back to a county born in 1845, when the seat town was set apart as the center of local civic life and later rebuilt after fire, consolidation and change. The old high school building now serves Decaturville Elementary School, a visible reminder that the lines between past and present schools were drawn by decisions made more than a century ago.

From county seat to classroom site

Decatur County was formed from Perry County in 1845, and Decaturville became the county seat. The state’s historical record also notes courthouse fires in 1869 and 1927, a useful sign of how often local institutions had to be rebuilt and reimagined in this county seat town. Schooling followed that same pattern of reinvention, with the earliest plans for education taking shape while the area was still part of Perry County.

The first school in Decaturville was Decaturville Academy, tied to the county’s organization in 1846. Lot 99 in the original town plat was set aside for school use, then purchased soon after county organization for an academy. The trustees named in that early era were J. L. Houston, J. A. Rains, H. C. Fryar, Wm. Henry and David B. Funderburk, names that anchor the town’s earliest educational ambitions to specific local families and leaders.

How the campus grew on the Perryville-Decaturville Road

The school site developed in layers. Around 1909, the first wooden structure went up on the Perryville-Decaturville Road, and around 1911 a brick building replaced it. The campus expanded again in 1928, showing that the school’s physical footprint kept pace with a growing community long before consolidation changed the county’s school map.

The first graduating class of record was the class of 1922, a milestone that marks the transition from a local academy to a high school with a clear academic identity. By the early 1970s, local school history already recorded that Decatur County had two high schools in 1927, Parsons and Decaturville, while the county also helped pay part of Scotts Hill High School’s operating cost. That detail matters because it shows how rural education in the county was never fixed to one model. It was negotiated across town lines, county budgets and distance.

Football, a gymnasium and the year fire changed everything

Decatur County’s first football team at Decaturville was organized in 1927 under coach C. A. Palmer. Palmer came to Decatur County that same year from Bethel College in McKenzie, began teaching and coaching in Decaturville High School, served as the school’s first football coach and helped with the construction of the gymnasium. The gymnasium itself was built with Works Progress Administration labor and hand-chiseled limestone blocks from county quarries, tying school life to New Deal-era public works and to the local landscape.

The school’s athletic and physical plant history was sharply interrupted in 1956. The gym burned in the early hours of January 22, 1956, with losses estimated at about $115,000 in the building and about $18,000 in equipment, while the insurance on the WPA building totaled only $8,000. Temporary classes were quickly arranged in storefronts and churches so school could resume the following week, a practical response that shows how deeply the campus was woven into daily community life.

The destruction did not stop there. The high school building burned on December 30, 1956. Investigators concluded that the 1956 fires and the January 1957 stovepipe incident were arson. Bids for a new elementary and high school building had already been taken on September 18, 1956, and the contract was awarded a few days later, an indication that rebuilding had become urgent even before the year was over. The school was renamed Decaturville High School in the 1957-58 school year, and the old building later became Decaturville Elementary School.

Crowder High and the county’s Black school history

Decatur County’s school history is also the story of segregation and the long fight for Black educational access. Before 1925, there was no high school for Decatur County’s Negro students. Around 1924, Professor David Carroll Crowder came to Decaturville and taught for a year in the Old Baptist Church on the hill before beginning the campaign for a high school.

Crowder is identified in reunion materials as the state’s only licensed Negro veterinarian, and he became the first principal of Decatur County Training School, the county’s first Black high school. The same materials list Mabel McKay of Nashville as the first home-making instructor at DCTS. Crowder High School and Decatur County Training School became central to the county’s Black educational heritage, not only as classrooms but as a statement that Black students in Decatur County had a school of their own despite the barriers of segregation.

That heritage has been preserved by alumni in concrete ways. The DCTS-CHS alumni association dedicated a historical marker memorializing the faculty and students of the school, and a separate Decatur County school gymnasium memorial was dedicated on October 15, 2013. Built with limestone blocks and the original cornerstone from the WPA-era gymnasium that burned in 1956, the memorial ties the physical loss of the old building to the persistence of memory among alumni and families. The 1992 reunion booklet included a letter from Governor Ned McWherter congratulating alumni gathering at Riverside High School for the first reunion of DCTS/CHS and explicitly linked the reunion to preserving community heritage.

How Riverside changed where students went to school

The biggest shift in the county’s modern school geography came with consolidation. Decaturville High School was consolidated into Riverside High School in the 1965-66 school year, and Riverside opened in 1965 as the countywide consolidated high school for Decatur County. It brought together students from Decaturville High School, Parsons High School and Crowder High School, ending the era of separate town-based high schools and concentrating secondary education in one countywide institution.

That consolidation explains why school loyalties in Decatur County still run along older community lines. Decaturville, Parsons and the legacy of Crowder High all remain part of how families remember school identity, even as students now attend a single county high school. The old Decaturville high school building’s current use as an elementary school completes the cycle: the site that once housed the county’s secondary school now teaches younger children, while the names of the old schools live on in alumni memory, memorials and the geography of local pride.