History abounds as Howard center readies for 100th birthday

When the door to the Howard Community Center swings open, the memories come tumbling out.

Claudia “Tossy" Alston picks them up and dusts them off.

“Every time I come here, I’m 6 years old again," she said.

In eight months, Tossy will be 90, so 6 is a long reach back. But who is to say you can’t go home again?

Howard isn’t just a stately brick building with seven front steps, four white columns and 10 windows across the facade.

It’s a time capsule.

Tossy got her unusual nickname from a cousin who couldn’t pronounce “Claudia,” and it stuck. In the fall of 1933, she started first grade at the old Howard school. It was smack in the middle of the Great Depression.

She remembers the classrooms, blackboards, pot-bellied stoves and outhouses, because there was no indoor plumbing. She recalls the stage, too, although it is no longer where it once was and not all the memories made the cut in her mental scrapbook. She coveted the lead role of Snow White in the school play. A girl with curly hair got the part. Tossy had to settle for being a violet.

An imaginary line ran through the center of the school — separating the boys and girls for all activities outside the classroom. They were allowed to socialize during school once a year: while gathered around the maypole on May Day.

Howard was the first school in Bibb County to serve hot lunches. They cost a whopping 3 cents.

“I remember it like it was yesterday," Tossy said, strolling through a building that has stood since 1916. She laughed. “I can even show you where I sat in the classroom, except that it’s now a bathroom."

Tossy is an artist, and her sketches of historic homes and churches in the Howard community hang on both walls of the front hallway.

The school was built on three acres of land owned by Charles Howard perched on a hill along U.S. 41 (Forsyth Road) behind Martha Bowman United Methodist Church. An old mile marker 8 once designated its distance from Macon. Now, the city has expanded its waistline and swallowed the suburbs.

At the time it opened, Howard replaced three one-room schoolhouses. It served as a combined grammar school and high school until 1924, when Lanier High split into two schools — Lanier for boys and Miller for girls. There were only five graduating classes at Howard, from 1920-24, before the high school closed and students were transferred to Lanier and Miller.

It remained an elementary school until 1938, when the school board voted to close the school and bus the students into town to attend Alexander IV Elementary on Ridge Avenue. Howard stood empty for five years during World War II while the community awaited its fate.

Mike Witman’s name isn’t etched on the side of the building, but the prominent member of Macon’s Jewish community deserves a shout-out for his role in saving the building. Witman was a farmer and one of the first Angus cattle breeders in the South. A noted philanthropist, when he learned the old Howard building might be sold and turned into a honky-tonk, he stepped in and led the efforts to purchase and preserve it.

DANCE LESSONS AND MORE

It has been an active and vibrant community club for more than 70 years. Generations of Maconites have swept their feet across the wooden floors of the auditorium. Youngsters have learned their manners and how to waltz and do the fox trot under its roof.

Perhaps no other building in Macon has been so versatile for so long. The Howard Community Club has hosted reunions, garden club meetings, square dance and ballroom dancing groups, fish fries, quilting clubs, baby showers, wedding receptions, quilting groups, spaghetti suppers, Zumba classes and, at one time, an annual county fair on the grounds.

The community club does not allow alcoholic beverages, but that doesn’t seem to matter to many outside groups. The facility stays booked for much of the year.

Yes, the grand old lady has aged gracefully. If her walls could talk, there would be thousands of stories to tell.

It will join two other local icons in celebrating its 100th anniversary next month.

Nu-Way and the Terminal Station will have a combined birthday celebration on Thursday, Sept. 29, from 6-9 p.m. at the Cherry Street Plaza in front of the Terminal Station.

Howard has planned its event for Sunday, Sept. 18, from 2-4 p.m. It’s an open house. Everyone is invited.

The community club, which now has about 85 members, has been around since 1945. John Barfield, who is heading up the centennial celebration, is an example of the club’s legacy.

He is a fourth-generation member. His great-grandfather, George Richard Barfield Jr., was valedictorian of the high school’s first graduating class in 1920. His great-grandparents and grandmother were charter members of the community club. His grandmother, Martha Barfield, was the first editor of the club’s newsletter, the “Howard Happenings,” and his mother, Patricia Barfield, is the current editor.

If you stopped at the corner of Bass and Forsyth roads and asked for directions to “Howard," you might get plenty of blank looks. There is a Howard High School and Howard Middle School a few miles up the road. There is a Howard Oaks subdivision and the entire voting precinct is known as “Howard."

But what is it and where is the community of Howard? Technically, it’s a 40-square-mile grid that runs from what was once known as Singer Hill (now the railroad underpass next to Rivoli Crossing Shopping Center) north to the Monroe County line and along an east-west corridor from Bowman Road (at Bass) to Zebulon Road.

The community club has been an important part in my family’s history too, and I’ve always loved the look and feel of the place. Two of my sons took cotillion and taught ballroom dancing in Susan Rogers’ classes. I have been to dozens of parties and other functions at Howard and once judged a chili cook-off there with Mercer President Bill Underwood.

It’s interesting to note that the Howard School closed 78 years ago, when the students were transferred.

Alexander IV is now on Historic Macon’s “Fading Five” list.

Howard is still rolling along at the century mark, buoyed by a lifetime of good times.

This story was originally published August 19, 2016 at 11:46 AM with the headline "History abounds as Howard center readies for 100th birthday."