Editor’s note: Kempner-area resident Bill Henderson has offered the following remembrances of the Mount Pleasant community. He was assisted by Lenora Isenhour and Lanette Carnes.

Henderson was born April 5, 1922, to Earnest and Gertrude Henderson. He served in World War II in Europe in the 10th Armored Division from 1942-45 under Gen. Eisenhower and Patton.

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Henderson attended school in the Mount Pleasant Community School from first to fifth grade. It was located on County Road 3050, formerly called the Mount Pleasant Road or CR 8.

After the fifth grade, he stayed home to help his father make a living.

In approximately 1928 or 1929, 94 students attended the Mount Pleasant School, which had two teachers. Some of the kids had to walk more than four miles to school each morning and evening.

Henderson recalls the kids had a lot of fun walking to school. A 12- inch board was used to cross Sulphur Creek. Sometimes someone would fall in the creek and get wet.

Sunday School classes also were taught at the Mount Pleasant School for about a year. Henderson recalls these classes were held either during his first or second grade of school and then discontinued for unknown reasons.

One incident he remembered about the school was hauling sand for the playground. Henderson, his brother Richard and their friend Sanford used a horse-drawn spring wagon to get some sand. They loaded too much into the small wagon. They made it to the top of the hill but when they started down, the wagon broke in the middle.

The front wheels came out from under the wagon, and the horse started running. Sanford fell off onto the left wheel and got hurt. The Henderson brothers hit the ground in front of the wagon. The horse ran off down near the school and stopped with the front wheel.

That night Henderson went to bed early, hoping to avoid a spanking, but his brother got a whipping for choosing the spring wagon instead of the larger wagon.

In recalling what the Mount Pleasant School was like in the 1930s, Henderson said, “In those days, we had no football to play. We had baseball to play with other schools. Either they would come to our home, or we to theirs.

“We had a basketball team at our school with about six players,” he continued. “All the schools would get together and go to Lampasas. They would call it ‘Country Meet.’ We got second place that year [1933-34]. That’s how we would find out who was the best team for that year.”

The boys on the team were Jack Montgomery, his brothers Luke Montgomery and Earnest Montgomery, Henderson’s brother Bob, Jack Rainwater and Forest Rainwater.

“That year, we played Center School for a playoff, and the Garner boys beat us by a point or two,” Henderson said. “I don’t know what all their names were, but Center School got first place that year.”

The girls in school played tennis and had a basketball court to play on, too. All the kids played a lot of different kinds of games. Henderson recalls a 15-minute recess in the morning, and then an hour for dinner and 15 minutes in the afternoon for a break. The breaks were used to walk to the outdoor outhouse.

“We had a lot of fun back in those days,” Henderson said. “We would have box suppers and pie suppers. At each one, you could bid on a box you wanted to eat with a pretty girl. We had ice cream suppers where everyone would bring a freezer of ice cream to eat.”

At Christmas, the students would put up a big tree at the school, Henderson remembers. “We did not have much to put on the tree, but they always put a few little things under that tree for us.”

The school closed as the younger population declined in the area. Students then were taken by pickup truck to Lampasas for school. The pickup had a wooden box over the bed for the kids to ride to school.

In the 1940s during World War II, the Alexander family home burned, and the vacant Mount Pleasant School was torn down and used to rebuild the home.