Mildred Trammell Elliott taught school for 46 years. She spent just over half of that span in Eastern Kentucky. Her arduous introduction to the profession at age 18 in 1929 came after just one year of college. The place, rough in terrain and reputation, was Cow Horn, in a very rural stretch of McCreary County west of the Big South Fork River.
Cow Horn School in 1914, 15 years before Mildred Trammell taught there. (Photo courtesy of Mark Elliott)
One-room schools sound like quaint oddities to modern ears, but for nearly a century in Kentucky they were the mainstay of the state’s rural public school system. The number of one-room schools peaked in Kentucky at 7,150 in the 1917-1918 school year, but remained above 6,000 throughout the 1920s, the decade in which Miss Trammell started teaching. Since there was no road leading to Miss Trammell’s Cow Horn School in 1929, reaching it entailed walking or a horse- or mule-ride of close to six miles. Little wonder then that she boarded with families of her school children. Yet far greater than the physical distance was the cross-cultural chasm between Miss Trammell’s relatively well-connected hometown of Pine Knot, Kentucky—on U.S. 27 and the Cincinnati and Southern Railroad—and roadless Cow Horn.
Miss Trammell never talked about her Cow Horn School days with her son (myself), and very rarely with her daughter Ann. I was long left to wonder how daunting this assignment must have been for a petite, five-foot-two novice educator. She undoubtedly had eighth graders and late starters in lower grades as tall or taller than she. Was the age range and size of some of her pupils intimidating? Retired educator and local historian Samuel D. Perry, who as a boy had spent a week in the Cow Horn Creek environs with a national forest crew, recalled that the district had a longstanding reputation as a rough place.
For most of my life, the topic of my mother’s one-room school experience was off limits. If she ever ventured reference to it, the comments were brief and cryptic. Still, occasional hints surfaced as to the young Miss Trammell’s takeaways from Cow Horn. She did say that no road led to her first school. More revealing, she enlarged and framed what must have been a treasured photo, one she had taken along her trek into her school. Hung on the living room wall of the family home for many decades, it is an evocative, black-and-white composition of a wintry, snow-draped Cow Horn Creek.
Cow Horn Creek in the winter of 1929-30. (Photo by Mildred Trammell, courtesy of Mark Elliott)
Fortunately, a firsthand account exists that underscores the extraordinary difficulty, as late as 1951, of accessing the site of the long-gone Cow Horn School, an account that also testifies to the awe-inspiring beauty of the old-growth forest that existed in the Cow Horn watershed.
In September 2025, my wife Darlene and I paid a visit to the aforementioned Samuel D. Perry. On this occasion, this master story teller enthralled us with recollections of spending a week with his father along Cow Horn Creek in 1951 in a nearly impenetrable portion of what is now Daniel Boone National Forest. As an eleven-year-old, young Perry had helped his father, Ledford E. Perry, cook for a forest service crew who were camping out along Cow Horn Creek while marking timber for selective logging. Perry related to us what he had published three years’ prior in the McCreary Journal under the title “Some Mighty Big Trees.” Even using the recently improved Route 92 from Stearns across the Big South Fork River at Yamacraw and up to the turnoff onto Jones Hollow Road, forest service workers still had to build some ten miles of access road from scratch. Once that was completed, “on a gorgeous June morning,” Ledford E. Perry, with son Samuel in tow, drove a forest service truck filled with camp supplies into:
“an almost unblemished wilderness, [into] the wild lands beyond the Big South Fork River….The blue sky disappeared, hidden behind a canopy of green that rose a hundred feet over our heads. Great white oaks, throwbacks to an earlier time, stood before us, their mighty trunks bearing witness to the passage of centuries. Others, the scarlets, the reds, the blacks, and the chinkapins lined what had become a narrow track through the woods. Maples, both sugar and red, rode the ridgetops and enormous hemlocks loomed over damp drains that emptied into Cowhorn Creek.”
After leading the way for over two hours, Stearns National Forest Ranger “Chig” Hurst got out of his army surplus Jeep: “He stood with his hands on his hips, marveling at the giants that towered over him. ‘These are some mighty big trees,’ he said. Dad and I could only agree. They were some mighty big trees, indeed.”
Twenty-two years’ prior, Miss Trammell, walking up Cow Horn Creek after having crossed the Big South Fork River by skiff, had had to make her way through this same virgin forest with towering trees overhead, including hemlocks that Perry remembered took three men, arm-to-arm, to encompass. One can only imagine the impact of such surroundings upon an 18-year-old, five-foot-two Trammell, both the beauty of the dark at midday, untrammeledwoodland and the snow-fringed creek she photographed.
Then, surprisingly and fortuitously, 40 years after my mother’s death in 1986, her niece, Nancy Trammell Tackett, recommended a source to me for her Aunt Mildred’s Cow Horn days. It proved invaluable. In 1929, Miss Trammell was far from reticent in the pages of the McCreary County Record about her one-room school. This newspaper published several of her reports on Cow Horn School happenings that give the impression of a teenage schoolmistress up to the challenge: “I can hardly realize that two months are nearly gone….We have not been idle….With 14 in the first grade alone…there’s no room for spare time, and why should there be? If more pains were taken with the foundation, I think there’d be more graduations.” This December 4 report continued with an upbeat mention of five students with perfect attendance. The narrative hardly suggests an instructor resigned to a dreadful fate, rather one committed to a responsibility that deserved her best effort.
Another of Miss Trammell’s published school reports, this one dated December 31, 1929, hinted memorably of the challenge posed by a classroom rowdy. Through the medium of a whimsical, light-hearted poem, she employed a bit of humor in depicting the taming of a mischievous, live-wired handful:
Once there was a little boy
Just the right size to annoy
And he had a peck of mischief
Wrapped up in his pocket ‘kerchief’
Tis of this mischief I must break him
Thought I—or at least make him
See he cannot act this way in school
So I tried all plans and rules
Ever made for use in schools
I begged and I pleaded with him
I talked and I read to him
But it never dawned upon his mind
That I meant only to be kind
And to teach him to be good
So when nothing else would do—
Nothing old or nothing new
I resolved to ask the child
What would make him be more mild
After much deliberation
After due consideration
He said “I think a whipping
Would stop me from this flipping
Of dogwood berries, haws, and paper wads.”
Miss Trammell quickly followed with a caveat regarding her ode to an out-of-sorts mischief maker: “Don’t get the idea that we believe altogether that the good old way of ‘lickin and larnin’ go together, but a rhyme is a rhyme that’s all.”
Additional paragraphs of this New Year’s Eve school report recounted the negative effect of deep snow on attendance, school room decorations “for Old Santa’s arrival,” and three pupils still with perfect attendance.
Not until 2025 did my sister and I learn of our mother’s newspaper school reports that proved to be such revelations. Yet the question lingered: why her disinclination after the fact to own her Cow Horn sojourn? Several factors may have been at play, the sheer difficulty of the experience, her graduation from Asbury College, and her final 22 years of teaching in a middle class suburb of Atlanta, Georgia.
As to difficulty, the physical and psychological challenges posed by Cow Horn were considerable. Miss Trammell found herself in a trackless settlement boarding with strangers, every week in a different household and a different bed, according to a chance comment she once shared with her daughter. She very well may have felt vulnerable instructing students, some of whom were larger and stronger than herself. At the very least, from her ode on a wayward pupil, we know maintaining classroom discipline was on her mind.
Mildred Trammell, Asbury College yearbook, The Asburian, 1929. (Photo courtesy of Mark Elliott)
The cultural milieu of Miss Trammell’s college education may also have caused her to distance herself from memories of Cow Horn. In the years she attended Asbury College, interspersed with teaching stints (1928-32), this Christian liberal arts institution stressed, and continues to stress, education centered on lifelong spiritual commitment. In addition, in the years she attended, Asbury placed great emphasis upon proper deportment, elevated elocution, and refinement in general, especially for its female students Though to my knowledge never described as such, Asbury in the 1920s and 1930s was for its undergraduate women something of a Southern finishing school. In keeping with this consideration, its founder, Reverend John Wesley Hughes, appreciated the school’s location in a safe place, as he put it, “away from all whirl, confusion and wickedness of city life.”
Dedication of yearbook to Mrs. Mildred Trammell Elliott, senior class sponsor, McCreary County High School. (Photo courtesy of The McCrearian)
In the 1920s and 1930s, rather than intercollegiate sports, fraternities, sororities, and alcohol, Asbury’s student life revolved around religious observances, which included scheduled campus revivals, required chapel, weekend preaching by pre-ministerial students, and mission emphases. A secondary but still integral emphasis of the college in those decades may be termed cultural uplift, including such extracurricular activities as intramural sports and literary and debate societies. To this point, Miss Trammell was a member of Asbury’s Intercollegiate Debaters her freshman year. All this is to suggest that Asbury’s cultural environment may have inclined a coed from southeastern Kentucky to make no mention of her teaching in a wild, un-scrubbed country place called Cow Horn.
Another circumstance that may have inclined my mother to put her Cow Horn days out of mind was her experience teaching in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. In the 1950s to 1970s, Atlanta experienced dramatic growth in what its boosters promoted as the capital of the New South. Atlanta also offered a better public school system for her children and a teaching opportunity with higher pay than what impoverished McCreary County could afford. Yet despite the boom times of DeKalb County just east of Atlanta, our mother would have been more than content to have remained as Stearns High School’s English teacher and drama coach where her thespians won a number of one-act play competitions at the University of Kentucky’s Guignol Theater.
But given the family’s move south, she made the best of it, much enjoying her membership in Delta Kappa Gamma, a professional society for women educators, and the honor of being chosen by her principal to have the governor’s first lady, Rosalyn Carter, observe her classroom.
Fording the upper reaches of Cow Horn Creek. (Photo courtesy of Mark Elliott)
In the end, a winter hike completed my quest for a deeper understanding of what my mother experienced in her daunting plunge into teaching as a teenager in a rural locale like Cow Horn. Pouring over topographic and forest service maps enabled me to chart a path into the former site of long-abandoned Cow Horn School.
Cow Horn School noted on a 1949 National Forest Service map. (Photo courtesy of Mark Elliott)
On December 4, 2025, two companions and I walked in from an improved gravel Cow Horn Road along a faint wagon track just short of a mile, fording Cow Horn Creek at least five times, to where School House Hollow meets Cow Horn Creek. (At this juncture a 1949 Forest Service map designates “Cow Horn School” beside a schoolhouse icon.)
We found no trace of the building, not even foundation stones. Nor did the site offer many clues as to prior habitation: some were inconclusive, such as long-discarded tin cans and a broken canning jar.
Tin cans and a broken canning jar at Cow Horn School site. (Photo by Mark Elliott)
Tin cans and a broken canning jar at Cow Horn School site. (Photo by Mark Elliott)
More definitive proof of a former settlement were two forlorn metal bed frames, some 30 yards apart, one with attached metal springs.
Metal bed frames at Cow Horn School site. (Photo by Mark Elliott)
I will long remember my sister Ann’s reflection upon viewing the December 4th photos I sent her: “The pictures are special, and tugging. If those trails and brooks could talk…. And those bed frames: stories untold.” Somehow confirming the Cow Horn School site was at least a modest affirmation of the long-ago labor there of eighteen-year-old Mildred Trammell Elliott.
Mark R. Elliott is an Asbury University Affiliated Scholar and editor emeritus of the East-West Church and Ministry Report.
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