Dusty box reveals parts of Carthage's history
Eight or so boxes, saturated in a half-inch layer of dust, were recently rescued from the corner of the new Carthage Junior High’s attic.
When R-9 Maintenance Director Gary Chorn popped open one of the lids of the boxes, he discovered a wide assortment of old, slightly yellowed documents ranging back to the early 1880s. Luckily, Chorn recognized the value of the contents before his crew, up clearing junk from the attic, could grab and dispose of them.
“They were way back in a dusty corner. I saw they were full of old (school) records so I didn’t let the crew throw them away.” Chorn said. “It was different years in the different boxes, and they just kind of lumped them all together over the years.”
The boxes were filled with all kinds of scattered school miscellany: old monthly bills spanning the entire year of 1905 from hired contractor Ellis Jackson, hand-scrawled notes, typewritten letters and even postcards — one showing the Jasper County Courthouse in all its glory.
Several items that caught Chorn’s eye were construction bills related to the then 1904-1905 construction of the then-new Carthage High School. One document — dated July 8, 1904 — showed total construction cost at $63,216. Another bill — dated Jan. 30, 1906 — showed the price had dramatically escalated to $74,541, all due to change orders. That’s a difference of $11,279, or roughly 15 percent.
When finished and opened in 1906, the building would cost the district $150,000.
As a construction worker and engineer, “I like looking at it, how things were done differently,” Chorn said. “It was fascinating to me that the actual change orders were 15 percent, which is not all that uncommon, and it’s really not uncommon today to go 5 to 10 percent.”
Fifteen percent, when talking about the new Carthage High School, would have been an additional $4.5 million. And while most of the construction paper to the 1904 building fit nicely into a single cardboard box, “the blueprints alone on the new high school probably weighed close to 60 pounds.”
But the workers “built a good building. It’s built like a castle, with the base 24-inches thick. I don’t think a tornado could tear that building down.”
One of the documents showed the names of the various workers who were piecing together the four-story school building, complete with their working times recorded in neat penmanship.
But not all of the documents had to do with school construction.
One document showed a purple-ink typed submittal by a local plumbing company to install two biology sinks inside the high school — two “18x36 emerald sinks set in a wooden table.”
There was a submitted document from school officials to Jasper County Commissioners dated July 5, 1904, showing there were “974 white males and 42 colored males” inside the district along with “1,088 white females and 62 black females.” Such wording blatantly displayed the racism at the time, and how, as a society, such talk was just taken for granted.
And long before sexual equality came decades later, a listing of “average salary per month” showed the nine male teachers in the school district were making $8,602 while the 38 female teachers were pulling in $4,987. In the same document, it showed there were 5,770 books inside the high school’s library.
On a letter dated 1918, there was a World War I stamp in the right-hand corner of the document showing a grim Woodrow Wilson saying, “No boy or girl should have less opportunity for education because of the war.”
Another letter, from the same year, was written by a Carthage female teacher requesting help to get to school from her home in Kendricktown, who was forced to pay out of her own pocket for a horse and buggy ride to school.
Another note talked about hired help whose job was to shovel coal in the basement of the high school all day long, to keep the boilers up and running.
All of the documents, Chorn said, “are fascinating stuff — just little snippets of how life was back then. It’s just amazing.”
All of the documents will be turned over to the Powers Museum here in Carthage for preservation.
“It shouldn’t be for any one person to have,” Chorn said of the boxes of documents. “This should be for everyone.”