Retired UGA educator spent 25 years in Oconee schoolhouse

Twenty-five years ago, John Huff accompanied a real estate agent to see an old schoolhouse in Oconee County that had been converted into a home.

But he grew concerned about the travel time from Athens as he made his way down a rural stretch of Georgia Highway 15.

“When we got as far as Hot Thomas Barbecue I said, ‘Let’s go back,’” recalled Huff, who at the time was a professor of interior design in the school of art at the University of Georgia.

But the agent insisted they take a peek.

“As soon as I saw it, I fell instantly in love with it,” Huff said.

In 1993 he purchased and moved into the schoolhouse located off Fambrough Bridge Road at the Highway 15 intersection.

Today, the schoolhouse in the Rose Hill community is one of the few landmarks left in this rural area that harkens to a bygone age of the early 20th Century. The old Jim Fambrough store is another landmark just down the highway.

“I have lots of information on the schoolhouse including rolls of students who went there, enough to get it on the National Registry of Historical Places, but I just never took the time to do that,” Huff said.

Huff is saying goodbye to the building erected in 1919 that became a community center in 1942, then the Rose Hill Hunt Club in the mid-1950s, and finally was converted into a home by a man named Ben Cook.

“If I didn’t find myself with my mother’s house and property in North Carolina I wouldn’t be leaving," he said. "But I can’t bring myself to sell the house and land there and we can’t have two older houses to keep up. We’re letting this one go, reluctantly."

Huff’s mother died a couple of years ago at her home in Mars Hill, N.C., and Huff has restored the house.

The Rose Hill school served the community until 1942, when the school system consolidated and it was no longer needed. During the time it was a school, it never had water even though they tried boring wells, Huff said.

When the building became a community center, a partition was torn down between two rooms and a bathroom was added, but in the 1950s it was no longer needed for that purpose, Huff said.

The building was sold to a man, who used it as the Rose Hill Hunt Club.

“It used to be great hunting grounds here,” Huff said.

But then Ben Cook and his wife purchased it in 1983.

“They were not from around here. He was a retired engineer and they traveled the country," Huff said. "They would buy an old house, fix it up and sell it.

“They did some wonderful engineering work on the schoolhouse. It is extraordinarily well insulated. They opened up the rooms by taking the ceilings out. I put in new double pane windows a few years back. I put a new roof on, new plumbing, new windows and a kitchen."

There is even a story behind how the home got its signature color.

“The schoolhouse was always painted white, but when the community decided to fix it up, a lot of people thought it looked too much like a church so they painted it red, so it’s been red longer than it was white,” Huff said.

“When I bought it, it had a red tip photinia hedge all around the front. The previous people put it in for privacy, but I didn’t think that was good because you couldn’t see the school house when you passed. I thought the schoolhouse should be enjoyed by everyone in the neighborhood, so I had all the hedges cut down."

When it was a community center, a barbecue pit was installed with a roof, but Huff placed a floor over the pit and closed it in to make an outdoor shed.

Huff, who had volunteered at the Oconee County Senior Center, met some of the elder ladies who remembered the community center.

"I’ve had a couple of women at the senior center, who have passed on, tell me they met their husbands at a dance at Rose Hill Schoolhouse,” he said.

Huff has landscaped the grounds in an effort connect the shed, the well house and a tree house, the latter built by the owners before him.

“I couldn’t quite figure out how to integrate that visually and aesthetically with the house, so I connected it by using edging and uni-linear lines, and put in a gravel path and gravel court in front of the school to give it a semblance of a schoolhouse,” he said.

“I think they must have graded what is the front yard because it’s perfectly flat,” he said. “The whole thing has a park-like setting.”

Huff said he has enjoyed the solitude of rural life. Sitting on the portico has been a favorite spot on early mornings and in the evening.

“I feel good about handing it on the next people,” the retired professor said.