Abandoned Appalachia
On a narrow side road off U.S. 460 at Millard, an aging brick school sits behind a chain link fence and tall grass. Locals still call it Millard Grade School or “the Rocky Road school,” after its address at 20 Rocky Road in Pikeville. For generations this was where Millard’s youngest students learned their letters, lined up for class pictures, and watched Christmas plays in a low ceilinged gym.
Today the buses and playground noise have moved up the hill to a newer Millard School campus on Millard Highway. The Rocky Road building stands quiet, its parking lot cracking and its windows slowly fading behind the brush. In that silence is a story that reaches from segregated log schools and mid century school building campaigns to Head Start classrooms and the problem of what to do with abandoned public buildings in Appalachian coal country.
This article pieces together that story from state surveys, school data, election records, local history, and community memory.
A graded school on Rocky Road
By the middle of the twentieth century Millard had grown from a scattered creekside settlement into a small but busy community near the confluence of Millard Branch and the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy. The children of coal miners, railroad workers, small farmers, and storekeepers needed more than the one room schools that had dotted Pike County in the early 1900s. County leaders responded with a graded elementary school that would eventually be known as Millard Grade School, and later Millard Elementary, at what would become 20 Rocky Road.
The exact construction date of the present brick building still needs to be pinned down in Pike County’s facility files, but we know that by the 1940s newspapers were already announcing graduations at “Millard Grade School,” signaling an established campus that served the upper elementary grades during the Second World War years and after. That generation of students came of age at a time when Pike County was still crisscrossed by coal tipples and company tracks, yet they walked into classrooms that looked very much like any rural Kentucky school of the era. Desks bolted to hardwood floors, globe in the corner, and worn concrete steps leading down to the buses.
The statewide Kentucky Historic Schools Survey, completed in 2001 and 2002 by the Kentucky Heritage Council and the Kentucky Department of Education, helps place the Rocky Road campus inside a bigger story. In its appendix listing “older” schools, the survey includes “Pike Co. – Millard Elementary” among Pike County’s historic school buildings. That means Millard was already considered an aging facility worthy of documentation while it was still in use.
The survey was created at a moment when many districts were weighing whether to invest in mid century schools or close them in favor of larger consolidated campuses. Millard appears in that appendix as one of hundreds of small community schools that had become both an educational service and a kind of civic landmark.
Segregated classrooms and “Colored School B”
The Rocky Road building cannot be understood without the longer history of Black education in Pike County.
The Notable Kentucky African Americans (NKAA) database at the University of Kentucky records that the first “colored school” in Pike County predates 1875, and that a separate system of African American schools operated into the mid twentieth century. In 1940, one of the county’s Black teachers was Edwin Pearson, identified in a contemporary list as “a grade school teacher in Millard,” proof that Black children in the Millard area were being taught within or alongside the same community name that white students claimed.
Another thread comes through the story of poet and teacher Effie Waller Smith. The Pike County Historical Society’s biography of Smith draws on William David Deskins’ book Pike County: A Very Different Place and describes a photograph labeled “Colored School B,” a log school near Millard, Kentucky. In that image Smith stands with her students and supervising officials, a Black teacher in a frontier style building that served African American children close to the Millard community.
Put together, these sources suggest that long before the modern Rocky Road campus existed, Millard was part of a patchwork of segregated schools. White children attended graded schools under the county system. Black children in and near Millard attended separate “colored” schools, including the log “Colored School B” that Smith helped staff. By 1940, the county still listed “Negro teachers” such as Pearson, yet within a generation those separate systems were formally integrated, leaving behind scattered photographs and brief mentions in reports.
The Rocky Road building, then, belongs to a second or third generation of Millard schools. Its cinder block walls and brick veneer are products of a later era, but they sit in a landscape shaped by earlier struggles over who had access to education in the first place.
The baby school of Millard
By the late twentieth century Millard Elementary at 20 Rocky Road had settled into a distinctive niche. Rather than carrying students from kindergarten through eighth grade, it became what many residents remember as the “baby school.” State derived datasets compiled on PublicSchoolReview.com list “Millard Elementary School (Closed 2010)” at 20 Rocky Road, Pikeville, serving grades prekindergarten through third. In its final years the school enrolled roughly 440 students with a student teacher ratio around 18 to 1, slightly higher than the Kentucky average.
Those numbers tell us a few important things. First, Millard was still a fairly large elementary despite its rural setting. Around 400 to 500 students had their first school experiences in the narrow hollow off Rocky Road, riding buses that snaked along U.S. 460 and the side branches of Millard Creek. Second, the very young grade span suggests that Polk County had already begun reorganizing its upper grades away from the Rocky Road campus well before complete closure. The baby school model kept the youngest children close to home, while older students moved to larger, more modern buildings.
PublicSchoolReview’s demographic tables, based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics and the Kentucky Department of Education, show Millard as nearly one hundred percent white across the 1990s and 2000s, with a consistently high share of students qualifying for free or reduced price lunch. The same site lists Millard’s nearest neighbor as “Millard School,” a pre K through eighth grade campus 0.4 miles away at 8015 Millard Highway.
That new Millard School on the highway, which the Pike County school district now promotes as its active campus, represents a very different approach to rural schooling. Instead of several small buildings scattered across the community, the district concentrated students in a larger, more efficient PK 8 complex. Facility planning documents from the late 2010s describe a modern Millard Elementary building of more than 55,000 square feet at the highway site, confirming that the district’s capital attention had shifted away from Rocky Road.
In other words, by the early twenty first century the Rocky Road building had become both essential and precarious. It still hosted hundreds of young children each year, yet it was surrounded by district plans that increasingly favored the new consolidated plant up the hill.
School, community hall, and polling place
Like many small schools in eastern Kentucky, Millard’s Rocky Road campus served as more than a classroom building. PTA meetings, Christmas pageants, youth basketball games, and community events filled its hallways and gym. In rural areas where there is no separate town hall, the school often becomes the only public indoor space large enough to hold a precinct, a community meeting, or a benefit dinner.
State election records show how that civic role worked in practice. A statewide spreadsheet of polling locations on the Kentucky State Board of Elections website lists “MILLARD GRADE SCHOOL” as a polling location in Pike County, with an address on East Shelbiana Highway and voting hours from six in the morning to six in the evening. During the 2020 general election, local media again named “Millard Grade School, 5724 E. Shelbiana Hwy, Pikeville” among Pike County’s consolidated voting sites.
The current polling place is clearly the newer Millard campus on Millard Highway rather than the Rocky Road site. Long time residents, however, remember earlier years when voters cast ballots at the old building. That pattern would fit the broader Appalachian experience. When a district opens a new consolidated school, the precinct name often follows the school’s name rather than a street address, shifting the polling place from an old campus to a new one while keeping the “Millard Grade School” label alive on election forms.
If you think about what Election Day actually looks like in a place like Millard, it is easy to picture the Rocky Road building full of adults instead of children. Cars lining the drive. Campaign signs planted along the fence. Neighbors who have not seen each other since graduation day stopping to talk in the parking lot before walking inside to sign the precinct book on cafeteria tables. Even after most of the yearbooks have been boxed up, those one day rituals keep the school woven into community identity.
Head Start and office years on Rocky Road
Millard Elementary’s life as a K 3 “baby school” formally ended around 2010. That is the closure year recorded in the PublicSchoolReview profile, which labels the Rocky Road campus as “Closed 2010” while the newer Millard School up the highway remains active.
Yet the building did not go dark all at once.
Head Start program records provide one of the clearest glimpses of the Rocky Road campus in its post elementary years. A listing for Pike County Head Start within the Big Sandy Area Community Action Partnership describes several center locations. In that list appears an entry simply labeled “Millard,” with the address “20 Rocky Rd, Pikeville KY” and a shared contact number for the Pike County Head Start network.
That notation suggests that even as K 3 students were moved to the new Millard School, at least part of the Rocky Road building remained in use as a Head Start center. It may have hosted preschool rooms, offices, or storage for a time, long enough for the address to be captured in federal program directories.
Other business and mapping directories have recorded 20 Rocky Road as the address for “Pike County School District” or “Pike County Board of Education,” often annotated as “permanently closed” or with no hours listed. Those entries match local recollection that the old school also served for a period as a central or satellite office before the district moved its administrative functions elsewhere.
Put simply, Rocky Road’s story did not jump straight from bustling elementary to empty shell. For several years it remained a useful piece of Pike County’s educational infrastructure, hosting some of the county’s youngest children in Head Start classrooms while also absorbing office and storage space that had to go somewhere after consolidation.
Recognizing an “older” school
The Kentucky Historic Schools Survey is more than a list of buildings. It is also a reflection on what older schools mean to their communities, and what might happen when enrollment or budgets no longer justify keeping them open.
In its narrative sections the survey notes that small town schools, especially those built before the modern consolidation wave, often serve as a community’s most visible public architecture. They hold war memorial plaques, championship banners, and the only commercial sized kitchen within miles. At the same time, declining enrollment, stricter building codes, and the high cost of modern heating and cooling systems can make it difficult for districts to justify renovating structures that were built for a different era.
Conference materials associated with the survey include a program session titled “What can your community do with abandoned school buildings” which walks through examples of adaptive reuse across Kentucky. The options range from senior housing and community centers to small business incubators and arts venues. The language used in that session directly addresses the emotional weight of school closures. Losing a school, it notes, is not only about losing classrooms. It is also about losing a place where generations gathered for shared experiences.
Millard Elementary’s appearance in the survey’s appendix as an older Pike County facility places it within that statewide conversation. Even before the last kindergarten class left its hallways, the Rocky Road building had already been categorized as the kind of school that communities either fight to save, reimagine, or quietly abandon when money and political will run out.
Empty building, living questions
If you drive to 20 Rocky Road today, what you see is a familiar Appalachian scene. A brick school with mid century lines. Plywood, metal, or darkened panes where windows once shone with fluorescent light. A parking lot that has begun to buckle under weeds. Fence lines slowly disappearing behind honeysuckle and saplings. Rooflines and structural condition vary from year to year, but the overall impression is clear. This is a school building no longer maintained as a school.
The Pike County School District’s current online directories list Millard School at its highway address, but do not treat the Rocky Road building as an active campus. Head Start directories still carry the Millard center at 20 Rocky Road as a site, though these listings are not always updated quickly when on the ground realities change. Mapping sites mark the property with ambiguous labels like “permanently closed” or “no information available.”
None of those sources can fully substitute for on site examination of the structure’s condition, but they do tell us that Rocky Road has moved from the center of Pike County’s educational system to its margins.
For alumni who remember teachers like Eda Chaney and others whose names appear in social media reminiscences, that change is more than an administrative detail. It is the difference between driving past a school that feels alive with their childhood memories and driving past a building that looks as if those memories no longer matter.
Segregation, integration, and memory in the Millard story
One of the most compelling reasons to document buildings like Millard Elementary is that they sit at the intersection of several different histories.
The NKAA entry on African American schools in Pike County reminds readers that Black education in the county began under conditions of deep inequality and persisted as a separate system into the 1950s. The brief reference to Edwin Pearson as a Black grade school teacher in Millard in 1940 anchors that story specifically in the Millard community rather than in Pikeville or some abstract district office.
Meanwhile, the Pike County Historical Society’s portrayal of Effie Waller Smith standing in front of “Colored School B,” a log school near Millard, captures a moment even earlier in that trajectory. A log building, a handful of Black children, a Black woman teacher who had attended Kentucky Normal School for Colored Persons in Frankfort, and white supervisors there to certify what was happening.
Those two scenes bookend a period in which Black schooling in Pike County moved from makeshift log structures to more formal graded schools. The Rocky Road building, as the main white elementary campus associated with the modern Millard name, belongs to the next chapter, one in which Black and white children would eventually attend integrated schools in the same system, though not always with equal resources or representation.
When we look at the abandoned Millard Elementary building today, we are not just seeing the shell of a baby school that closed in 2010. We are looking at a place that absorbed a century of educational change, from separate log schools and segregated teaching assignments to integrated classrooms and the early childhood programs of Head Start.
What should happen to Rocky Road’s school
Kentucky’s historic school surveyors are clear about one thing. Not every abandoned school building can be saved as a school. Some are too damaged or contaminated to justify renovation. Others sit on sites that make no sense for modern traffic patterns, or in floodplains where regulations limit new investment.
But they are equally clear that communities have choices.
One choice is to do nothing and let the building decay behind “No Trespassing” signs. That path often leads to eventual demolition or collapse, with no opportunity to salvage the community’s connection to the site beyond a few photographs.
Another choice is adaptive reuse. In other Kentucky towns, older schools have become senior apartments, community centers, small business hubs, or mixed use developments that keep the gym and auditorium available for public use. The Kentucky Historic Schools Survey explicitly encourages local governments, nonprofits, and private partners to see school buildings as shells that can hold new purposes.
For Millard’s Rocky Road school, the options would depend on a careful assessment of the structure’s current condition, environmental concerns, and ownership. The county’s property valuation administrator and clerk’s office hold the deed history for the tract, which would show whether the land remains in school board hands or has been transferred to another entity. Local officials would also need to determine whether the building is structurally sound enough to justify reuse or whether only partial preservation is possible.
Whatever the practical outcome, simply documenting the building’s history now is a kind of preservation. It ensures that future Pike Countians will know that their community once invested in this particular site as a place for children, voters, and Head Start families, even if the bricks and mortar one day come down.
Sources and further reading
Kentucky Heritage Council and Kentucky Department of Education, Kentucky Historic Schools Survey (2002), Appendix listing “Pike Co. – Millard Elementary” among older Pike County school facilities and narrative sections on consolidation and abandoned schools.Kentucky Heritage Council
Public School Review, “Millard Elementary School (Closed 2010), 20 Rocky Road, Pikeville, KY 41501,” derived from NCES and Kentucky Department of Education data on enrollment, grade span, and closure year.Public School Review
Big Sandy Area Community Action Partnership – Pike County Head Start listing, showing “Millard – 20 Rocky Rd, Pikeville KY” as one of the county’s Head Start center locations.headstartprograms.org
Kentucky State Board of Elections, statewide polling location spreadsheet, listing “Millard Grade School, 5724 E Shelbiana Hwy, Pikeville KY 41501” among Pike County polling places.State Board of Elections
Mountain Top News, “Voting locations in Kentucky,” 3 November 2020, listing Millard Grade School on East Shelbiana Highway as a Pike County voting site.Mountain Top Media
Notable Kentucky African Americans (NKAA), “African American Schools in Pike County, KY,” overview of Black schools in the county, with time frame from the 1870s through mid twentieth century.Nkaa
Mountain Sports Hall of Fame Facebook post summarizing NKAA research and quoting a 1940 list of “Negro teachers” in Pike County that includes Edwin Pearson as a grade school teacher in Millard.Facebook
Pike County Historical Society, “Effie Waller Smith,” interpreting William David Deskins’ Pike County: A Very Different Place and describing a photograph of “Colored School B,” a log Black school near Millard where Smith is pictured with students and supervisors.Pike County Historical Society
Pike County School District facility planning documents for Millard Elementary and Millard School, including description of a newer Millard Elementary building of approximately 55,200 square feet at 8015 Millard Highway.Kentucky Department of Education+1
Pike County Board of Education facility files and BG project records for “Millard Elementary / Millard Grade School, 20 Rocky Rd” – for original construction date, additions, and official closure or conversion decisions.
Pike County Clerk and PVA property records for 20 Rocky Road, including deeds, plats, and any reclassification from school to administrative or surplus property.
Local newspapers such as the Appalachian News Express and older titles, for reports on building openings, additions, graduations, PTA events, and closure coverage around 2010.
Yearbooks, graduation composites, and PTA scrapbooks from Millard Elementary and Millard Grade School, likely held by former staff, alumni, the Pike County Public Library, or the Pike County Historical Society.
Oral history interviews with former students, teachers, custodians, and Head Start staff who worked in the Rocky Road building during its school and post school years.
William David Deskins, Pike County: A Very Different Place – for broader history of Pike County communities, including Millard and Black schools such as “Colored School B.”
NKAA entries on African American schools in eastern Kentucky counties for comparative context on segregated education in the region.Nkaa
Kentucky Heritage Council publications and conference sessions on the reuse of historic school buildings, including case studies of adaptive reuse in rural communities.Kentucky Heritage Council