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The ruins of the school stand in a grove in eastern Alamance County. Woodpeckers have pecked holes in the walls, and time and vandals have caused other damage. Still, the building can be saved — and restoration is the intention of nearby Elon University.

The Travis Creek School started in the 1840s, became the Cable School sometime after the Civil War and is Alamance County’s only surviving “common school” at its original site.

Kaye Cable Murray’s family owned the school and its quarter-acre lot from the start until she recently donated the property to the university. Elon was founded a mile south in 1889, with fields and woods between campus and the wooden schoolhouse.

University expansion has closed the distance. A football field house for Rhodes Stadium is under construction next to the old school.

Research in 1999 by Elon student Martha McDuff revealed common schools began under Guilford County-born Calvin Wiley, after the legislature voted in 1839 to give money to districts whose citizens voted yes for “common” schools. Common means free, as opposed to tuition-charging private academies. Each district had to match the state funds.

The Travis/Cable school had one large classroom, with a device for partitioning the space. Another room separated by a chimney with fireplaces on both sides was the teacher’s home.

Blackboards were considered a frill. McDuff’s research indicates a wall was painted black as a substitute.

The school made do with a teacher, textbooks and students who walked considerable distances. Kaye Cable Murray grew up among former students, including Florence Cable and Jane Huffines, first cousins of her father.

In later years, Cable and Huffines socialized at the Cable farm with old classmates. Murray, then a little girl, sat with them. She regrets now, as do all former children who sat among elders, not paying closer attention. She could have learned plenty about the old school.

But watching Huffines and Cable, she knew their school was an educational success.

“Jane Huffines ran the farm without a checkbook but always had liquid assets,” Murray says. “Her business know-how enabled her to keep the farm’s 200 acres together during the Great Depression of the 1930s. That was amazing.”

The great-great-grandfather of Earle Danieley, Elon’s president emeritus, taught at the school. Asked how these primitive schools succeeded, “You are asking a tough question. Some people are going to make it regardless of the lack of opportunity.”

Carole W. Troxler, a professor of history emeritus at Elon, warns against overly romanticizing common schools as beacons of learning. Some had lazy and lackluster teachers. Still, she believes the schools generally succeeded because of good textbooks and inspiring teachers. They often lacked college training but many had traveled. They read and they wrote.

The Travis Creek/Cable School closed about the time of World War I and became an election polling place, then a grain storage building for the nearby Cable farm.

In recent times, vagrants have marked up walls. Some trespassers removed floor boards and made a fire ring in the ground below.

Elon will hire a preservation consultant. Once restored, the school will be open for tours and for university use. It’s a situation of the new meeting the old.

A challenge: How many students today could at the teacher’s command make a rhyme using names of fellow students.

Students did so at Travis Creek/Cable. Researcher McDuff found this an example:

“I tell you these lines they are hard to compose,

Commencing with Walter in the very front row.

Now comes Anner there I reckon Daisy,

Florence and Etter and Effiy a little bit lazy.”

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net