Education: Hillbilly’s School System

One fall day in 1892, a raw 22-year-old named Blanford Barnard Dougherty came down out of the mountains of western North Carolina to the little town of Lenoir. Ahorse and by shanks’ mare, he had traveled all the stormy night from Boone, 25 miles away. He was going to college at Wake Forest, N. C. At Lenoir, young Dougherty cloppered on to a train, the first he ever did see. Finding the second-class car full, he made himself comfortable in first class. When the conductor tried to put him back in second class, the sharp-witted hillbilly pointed to a sign forbidding passengers to change cars while the train was in motion. He rode first-class all the way to Raleigh.

After attending four colleges (Wake Forest, Holly Spring, Carson-Newman, University of North Carolina), Blanford Dougherty went back to Boone and with his brother, Dauphin Discoe, built a two-room cabin, there in 1900, they opened the Watauga Academy. Today, thanks to homespun Dr. Dougherty’s political skill, his school has grown to be the Appalachian State Teachers College, one of the South’s best, with nearly 1,000 students and a $2,500,000 plant. Dr. Dougherty, president of the college, is a power in the State. At 69, he has lost none of his sharpness, none of his homespun ruggedness. Bald and stoop-shouldered, he always wears a broad-brimmed black felt hat and stiff collar. When he has a political chore to do in Raleigh, he collars legislators in hotel lobbies, doodles with a pencil stub on one of his shoe soles while he talks to them.

This week was a proud one for old Blanford Dougherty. One day Congressman Robert (“Old Muley”) Doughton and many another bigwig arrived at Boone to help him dedicate a new $150,000 science building. They praised a still greater Dougherty achievement: a system of State support for its public schools that is the envy of every other State in the Union (except tiny Delaware, which has a similar system).

Biggest headache of U. S. educators is inequality of school finances. Dr. Dougherty went up & down the State, year in & out, investigating every county’s schools and taxes. He found that Forsyth, one of the richest counties, spent $10,000 all told for each child’s education; Dare, one of the poorest, $1,500.

Few years ago he sat down in a Raleigh hotel room with a State Senator, wrote a bill. Then he toured the State, sold his bill to county politicians. Result: the Legislature passed the bill, levied a Statewide school tax. Year by year he got the Legislature to up this equalization fund, in 1933 got what he wanted: passage of a bill giving the State complete financial responsibility for the public schools. Today every North Carolina locality has a standard eight-month school term. All the money ($26,000,000 this year) comes from State revenues.

Outside North Carolina, few citizens have heard of Blanford Dougherty, but at Boone this week he was acclaimed as a historymaker in U. S. education, worthy to rank with Massachusetts’ famed Horace Mann.