The 17 stairs bisect an impressive rock wall on 13th Avenue and extend up to what is now a massive empty lot on the west side of  Missionary Ridge.

The terraced lot with a nearly unimpaired view of Lookout Mountain was once the home of Cedar Hill School, which served pupils from the early part of the 1900s through the early 1960s.

“It was a brick school — kind of forbidding looking,” said North Chattanooga resident Richard Mullis, who attended from 1936 to 1942. “There was not a lot of upkeep, but it was an OK school — probably not on par with Normal Park (then a newer and popular school in North Chattanooga).”

A new Cedar Hill Elementary School was built on the west side of Rossville Boulevard in the mid-1950s and served students for several more decades before becoming a Head Start center. In fact, the old and new Cedar Hills co-existed in the Chattanooga City Schools system for several years.

The original two-story school, Mr. Mullis said, housed grades one through eight until East Lake Junior High was built in the early 1930s.

When he attended Cedar Hill, the first grade was segregated from the rest of the school in a four-room frame house with front and back porches behind the larger building, closer to 14th Avenue.

“I guess it was overcrowded,” said Mr. Mullis, whose mother also attended the school.

The basement of the building contained two “great, big boilers,” he said, and the man who maintained them kept the place “immaculate.”

Jerry Parker of Murfreesboro, who attended Cedar Hill from 1949 through 1955, said there were classrooms in one part of the basement when he attended and the frame house behind the school was gone.

He said the school population was not that big by then and contained probably two classrooms per grade.

The building had fire escapes, Mr. Mullis said, that teachers told the students were condemned “to keep us from playing on them.”

He said the play areas around the building were rock and were responsible for “a lot of damage to knees, elbows and heads.”

“It wasn’t a bad time,” Mr. Mullis, 78, said. “We just didn’t know any different.”

For first and second grades, teachers would sit at the lunch table with their pupils.

“Lunch was almost like a family meal,” said Mr. Parker, 65, “with the teachers seated at the head of the table.”

In the post-World War II Cold War era, atomic bomb drills were a regular occurrence.

“An alarm would sound,” he said, “and the teachers would direct us to the basement. We would kneel on the floor with our arms over our heads.”

Among the yearly activities was a spring Flower Day, Mr. Mullis said. Each child would bring flowers, which were in turn distributed to the local hospitals.

“Everybody would cut their mother’s iris patch up,” he said.

Mr. Parker said there was an annual fall festival in October and ongoing Savings Bond drives.

In the drives, during which students pasted stamps in a booklet on their way to a bond, the success of each class was measured by how far an airplane suspended on a string from the class drew close to the principal’s office, he said.

“The Cedar Hill Elementary School that I attended was well-managed and staffed by teachers who cared for their students,” said Mr. Parker. “Those were good days.”

Copyright ©2008, Chattanooga Publishing Company, Inc.

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