UPHILL BOTH WAYS: GOING TO SCHOOL IN “THE BOTTOMS” OF WARDVIEW

 Have you ever heard the stories, or told them yourself to sleepy kids or grandkids reluctant to get on the school bus, about having to walk 20 miles to school uphill both ways? Some early residents of Wardview, a remote farming community as far northwest as you can go in Bossier Parish, Louisiana, actually had those stories beat. And, unlike “uphill both ways,” they weren’t telling tell tales, they were telling local history of life in “The Bottoms.”

Wardview is directly bordered by the Red River to the west, Arkansas to the north and Plain Dealing to its southeast. As described by local resident Jack Gore, who wrote a column for the former Plain Dealing Progress newspaper, the heart of the area was where Highway 537 met “the road to Arkansas” and “the road to the river.” With its proximity on the eastern side of Red River, the area was also known as “the River Bottoms” or just “the Bottoms.” The rich soil meant it was once a thriving a farming community for cotton and food crops. Nowadays, the community of Wardview lives largely in memories, newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, and oral histories, including several from the History Center collection.

Former Bossier Parish librarian and bookmobile driver, Billie Williams Stevens, who was born in 1928, told in one of these oral history interviews of the adventurous school bus rides when she was growing up in Wardview and attending school in Plain Dealing. At that time, Wardview consisted of a couple of stores, a cotton gin, and a church. “I remember one time we hit a bump and a nail hit my head,” Mrs. Stevens said, laughing, “and I bled for a long time. Of course, I went home and Mama poured some coal oil or turpentine on it, and I didn’t go to the doctor. We didn’t go to the doctor back then.”

“Of course, … we’ve always said about Huey Long, with him getting the schools consolidated from out there, we’ve always said that he should have done the roads first because sometimes we would have to get off of the bus and try to push the bus up some of those slick hills, and by the time we got to school we’d be late.”

Unbeknownst to young Billie, this experience would serve her well in her future library career. She was known to push the Bossier Parish Libraries bookmobile out of a ditch a time or two – or three! Even an uneventful normal ride lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes, one way, with 45 other bus mates. Of course, that was practically a shortcut compared to when there was flooding, a common occurrence in a place referred to as “the Bottoms.” Mrs. Stevens recalled,

“I don’t remember what year it was, I was in the first grade, and we had a flood, and you could not get the bus down to Wardview. The only way to catch the bus was to take a boat out to the hills and then catch the bus.” Mrs. Stevens laughed when the interviewer asked if the boat was a ferry. “No, no,” she replied. “Usually, it was just the road that was under water, so people who had boats ‘ferried’ across with their Jon boats (a small but stable flat-bottomed utility boat).”

Mrs. Virginia Horneman Allen who grew up in Wardview reminisced in her oral history interview with her two sisters,

“I had to get up early and catch the bus [to school in Plain Dealing] and walked a mile until I was in the 7th grade to catch the bus unless it rained and they’d take me, somebody would take me down on a horse…I had to wear overshoes all the time and

pull ‘em off and leave ‘em down at the house down at Uncle Will’s place where we caught the bus. [The bus] came around the river then. That’s where the road…”

Virginia’s sister, Mrs. Winona Horneman Authement, chimed in: “It was the only road, Old River.”

“And then,” interjected Mrs. Allen, “when I was in the 7th grade, Mr. Roy Bolinger [neighbor] was on the Police Jury or something like that and they built a road off of the road that went on to the Arkansas line to our house.” That way the bus could come right to their house on Arkansas Line Rd. when their father donated the land for it. Mrs. Allen no longer had to carry her overshoes anymore and they didn’t have to climb what all three sisters, Mrs. Allen, Mrs. Authement and Marihelen Horneman, remember as a “really high levee.”

For Wardview’s African American students, the schools were not yet consolidated until the 1950s. Students attended small, frame school houses like the two-room Still House School and the one-room Lake Port School in the Wardview area. Although they did not yet have to make the trek to Plain Dealing, their travels to school did not follow a simple, straightforward route, either. For example, to get to Still House school there was only one possible road to take - Log Ferry Road. This road crossed the “the Big Ditch” (created to alleviate flooding in the Bottoms), which was over a hundred feet wide in places. The Still House and Lakeview sports teams played against each other but did not have buses to travel to games. Athletes would have to walk several miles from one school to the other in the soft, damp ground of the Bottoms.

If you have any information, stories, or photos about Wardview, we would love to add material to the History Center’s research collection. Please come to the History Center to learn more about Wardview and other rural Bossier communities at 2206 Beckett St, Bossier City, LA. We are open M-Th 10-8, Fri 10-6, and Sat 10-5. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org

For other fun facts, photos, and videos, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB, @bplhistorycenter on TikTok, and check out our blog http://bpl-hc.blogspot.com/.

Photo: “Lakeport School” two-room schoolhouse in Wardview, northwest Bossier Parish, in 1907. In this early photo, Lake Port school housed white students before they were bussed to Plain Dealing, La. to attend school in the new, brick Plain Dealing High School building that was completed in 1921. Lake Port then became a school for African-American students.

 Article by: Pam Carlisle