Next time high school students think about playing pranks, they may want to consider just how permanent of a record they’ll create.
Amite County’s Historical and Genealogical Society unveiled a collection of 3,050 school registers Monday, covering 154 schools around Amite County open at various times between 1882 and 1959.
The records will be held at the Historic Little Red Schoolhouse in Liberty.
Some include such detailed information as notes on which students had “defective pupils” or “deceased tonsils.”
They were accumulated through the efforts of Glen Huff and Oma Gordon, president of the society.
Liberty Mayor Rick Stratton and town employees helped with the transportation of the records to the schoolhouse.
Volunteers spent a week and a half sorting and putting the records in order.
The records are now grouped alphabetically and arranged by year.
“This was a labor of love,” said Vera Prestridge, chairman of the committee for the Little Red Schoolhouse. “They were dirty, nasty, filthy, dusty … . I didn’t work so hard when I got paid.”
But Prestridge said motivation was easy to find, because the records exemplified the spirit of the area’s first settlers.
“I admire the people that came before us,” she said. “The first two things they did in all these little communities was open a church and a school. … There might not have been nine or 10 students in the class, but they had schools. You had all these little schools in Amite County.”
