Brady Flanigan
Editor
The railroad approaches town as a rumble rising from the ground. The boxcars roll by and shake the leaves of the trees and whip the grass in Bell Buckle Park as they pass.
It’s bizarrely well-maintained grass, the lawn of Bell Buckle Park. The whole 12.5 acres, greener than anywhere else in town, it seems. It is a large park for a town of 400. There’s an amphitheater and a walking trail with concrete benches. A wood-chip playground and exercise equipment. There’s a huge glass-and-concrete mosaic of a lobster, a ten-foot-tall metal dandelion, and a bronze statue of a boy with his fist raised defiantly toward the sky, cradling a lobster. The city of Bell Buckle, Tennessee, even has the gall to operate public restrooms, and somehow they stay surprisingly free of ammonia and Copenhagen stench.
The park’s main anomaly, ignoring the lobster motif, lies at the front of the property beside the parking lot. It’s a long building resembling an abandoned firehouse—two stories on the right, one on the left. There are two garage doors on the front, and the windows are bricked up. Some are painted over with reliefs of clouds and forest, as if staring inside the building was the same as staring out. Some walls are made from hand-cut stone and others cinder block, and vines are crawling up the side. But that abandoned firehouse isn’t a firehouse at all. It’s an old school, 50 years abandoned and slowly retrofitted by the city over the decades to fit its needs as a junk barn.
The Bell Buckle School opened September 9, 1927. It began with primary and home-ec rooms in ’38. A gym in ’39. It grew for most of its life: a grade-school wing in ’53, science labs and more classrooms in ’63. By ’67–68 the schools had integrated—thirteen years after Brown—on paper at least: 315 white students and 60 black. That’s a history architecture doesn’t mention.
Just after midnight, when the moon was apexing, on April 18, 1972, the gym caught fire. It’s not fully understood what started the fire, but it burned through the night. The fire department fought the blaze, and by morning only the elementary rooms were standing. They believed a double cinder block wall slowed the blaze enough to give firefighters time to stop the flames.
A week later the board voted to build Cascade Schools between Bell Buckle and Wartrace, and the Bell Buckle School was left behind to watch the trains.
But for four years now there’s been a group trying to give the school something to do—Friends of the Historic Bell Buckle School. They’re a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in…Bell Buckle…who’ve made it their mission to revitalize the place, turn it into a community center, preserve its history, and memorialize it.
One afternoon, Vice Chair Sara Lee Fox and Secretary Nita Carroll sat down in the actual Bell Buckle firehouse to talk about their organization’s mission. Before the journey, there was the charter: “There was a move to tear the building down,” Fox said. It sat derelict long enough the City of Bell Buckle was prepared to demolish it. “We asked for time to have it inspected… it didn’t need to be torn down; the structure was actually still good.”
Part of the push was basic recognition. “A lot of people… did not realize… that that’s a school building,” Fox said; for years it was just storage—“an old police car… lots of sewer meters.”
City Hall had a prod, too. “Why’d you wait till now?” Carroll remembers being asked. “That is my only regret—you’re right.”
So they founded the organization in 2021, drew up a memorandum of understanding with the city, and set the traffic lanes: the building stays public; the nonprofit’s job is to get it running and keep it useful. There’s political memory in the mix; “Ronnie is the mayor… [and] an alumnus of the old school.” Mayor Ronnie Lokey. He had come by earlier to deliver the firehouse key to Sara. At first glance, most would think he’s an old fire chief rather than a mayor. A lumbering man in blue khaki shorts and a Bell Buckle Fire Department shirt. He wore Coke-bottle glasses and shook your hand with a mission to break it.
The Society’s early work has been mostly unglamorous—clean-outs; plywood where plywood makes sense; cameras to dissuade the chisel-happy; water on, bathrooms repaired, doors that shut. Resurrection by errand. They’re not polishing a rune yet, so much as bringing something back from ruin. Vandalism spiked now and then—somebody chiseling through brick, a restroom torn up.
They’ve been told the bones are worth the trouble. An engineering team from MTSU paced the floors, took photos, measured the spans, and came back with the verdict a salvage-minded nonprofit hoped for. “It didn’t need to be torn down,” Fox said. Carroll added the piece everyone listens for: “It’s good bones,” she said, “no asbestos. It’s been removed.” Inside, the old walls still wear that midcentury arsenic green; a few sinks and toilets remain.
The Society’s future plans are incremental. “We want the windows back,” Fox said, “and an entrance that doubles as a memorial.” They envision using the classrooms as rec spaces, a small archive perhaps. They’ve also anchored the vision to a working example: the Bachman Community Center on Signal Mountain, a Depression era schoolhouse in Hamilton County that’s been retrofitted to a community center.”It’s up and functioning… got a thrift store… full-time staff.” As one of them put it, “if we put the bones to it…it has that potential.”
Money weighs most on the project. “Probably a million dollars,” Fox said, “and we’ll have to put an elevator in to make it ADA.” They’ve raised ~$66,000 in four years, plus about nine or ten thousand in sponsors. Set against a seven-figure target, that’s daunting. At that pace alone, the project will take decades. This year they missed a Greenway grant—too much of what they’ve secured is in-kind—and they’re holding cash until it can move something meaningful; fascia work and other hardening are next bids. Costs rise while the pool of alumni shrinks—Carroll’s line later puts it plainly: “If we don’t do it soon, we’re running out of alumni.”
On September 13, the Friends group will hold a Sunset Gala at Lynnfield Gardens: music by Brett Bone, a silent auction, a plated meal and drinks. Tickets are $100 a seat. “We’re going to do a seated, plated meal… and one of the things that we hope to do is to involve the Webb students to serve… and so that’s community service for them.” Capacity is about 100, set by the venue—“that’s what we can comfortably seat.”
They’re buying time as much as bricks. Cameras in the park have cut down on the chiseling; fresh locks outlast curiosity; the old cars and water meters have been moved out.
Carroll carries the long arc without theatrics. “I was a sophomore the year it burned,” she said. “It changed my life. If we don’t do it soon, we’re running out of alumni.”
After the interview, Fox and Carroll led a walkthrough of the school—bricked-in windows waiting to be opened, light slipping in through the rolled-up garage doors. A long chalkboard still ran the main room; a few wrought-iron desks stood off to the side; the porcelain water fountain clung to the wall. Outside—a mosaic of hand-cut stone, brick, cinder blocks, and nature creeping in. Inside it’s only rooms and echo.
The trains still go by; the grass still whips. The building keeps its counsel. What comes next is unromantic—checks, calendars, bids—and the ordinary miracle of people showing up. The building will wait. Towns are good at that.
