TRANSCRIPT OF VIDEO
HERMAN HARRISON: Oh, I guess they were the best days of my life.
ADRIENNE McGIBBON: And Herman Harrison has seen many days, 95 years of them. He grew up in the same house where his mother was born in 1889.
HERMAN HARRISON: It was an old log house with chickens in it and you could see out between the chickens and see the stars at night. Come a snow, you have snow laying on you, blowing in on your bed.
ADRIENNE McGIBBON: Even after all these years, Herman still remembers his first day of school.
HERMAN HARRISON: My mother had an old wood cook stove and she always put the door down, let it cool out after cooking, and I backed up against that door. I went to school with bandages around both knees.
ADRIENNE McGIBBON: And it was a long walk to school for a child.
HERMAN HARRISON: Yeah, I walked a half-a-mile. The old road didn't have no gravel on it then. It was mighty muddy in places. We had... The winters were worse than they are now.
ADRIENNE McGIBBON: Herman attended Pleasant Hill School, a one room schoolhouse in the Snow Creek District of Franklin County. He says he was a mischievous student but excelled in his lessons.
HERMAN HARRISON: My mother was a schoolteacher and she had taught me pretty well my ABCs and arithmetic when I went to school. I never had no trouble learning.
ADRIENNE McGIBBON: He did so well, his teachers encouraged him to continue on to high school and then to college.
HERMAN HARRISON: Back in those days, we didn't have no money to pay for college. I had two of my high school teachers wanted me to go to college, but I didn't make it.
ADRIENNE McGIBBON: Herman made it further than most in Franklin County back then. Benny Gibson, a former Franklin County educator who regularly checks in on Herman says students often left school after seventh grade.
BENNY GIBSON: Well over 50%, closer to 75% of students would drop out of school at that time because they were 12, 13, 14 years old, whatever, and they were needed on the farm.
ADRIENNE McGIBBON: Benny has been researching the area's history of one room schools. He says some students who did well continued their schooling.
BENNY GIBSON: A few of the students wanted more and they would have to travel a little bit farther to one of the schools that offered high school courses.
ADRIENNE McGIBBON: Herman used his smarts to become a carpenter. He never married and still lives in the same house where his mother was born. But he's happy to call Franklin County home.
HERMAN HARRISON: I haven't seen anywhere else yet that I'd rather be than here.
