Appalachian Community Histories – Slayden, Marshall County, Mississippi: From Gourd Neck to an Agricultural High School Community
In the northern reaches of Marshall County, Mississippi, near the Tennessee state line, the small community of Slayden has a history that reaches far beyond its modern crossroads along U.S. Highway 72. What began as a rural settlement in the nineteenth century developed into a center of farming, commerce, religious life, and agricultural education, supported by families whose connections to the area extended across generations. For much of the twentieth century, its agricultural high school stood at the center of community life, drawing students from beyond Marshall County and providing a gathering place for residents whose livelihoods were closely tied to the surrounding farmland.
Slayden was once known as Gourd Neck, a name preserved in local tradition before the community became Slayden’s Crossing. Its early settlers established farms and businesses along important transportation routes, while churches and schools gradually gave the scattered settlement a more recognizable identity. Although the community never grew into a large town, its history reflects the broader changes that transformed northern Mississippi, including the displacement of the Chickasaw people, agricultural expansion, racial violence, educational reform, school desegregation, and the gradual modernization of rural life.
Before Slayden: Chickasaw Land and Early Settlement
Long before Slayden appeared on maps or in postal records, the surrounding countryside belonged to the Chickasaw homeland. The Chickasaw people occupied extensive territory across northern Mississippi and neighboring regions, maintaining communities, agricultural lands, and transportation routes that existed generations before the arrival of the families later associated with Slayden.
The Treaty of Pontotoc Creek, signed on October 20, 1832, established the framework through which the United States would oversee the sale of Chickasaw lands in Mississippi. Additional negotiations in 1834 revised the arrangements, and the federal government began surveying and selling land throughout the region. These developments were part of the larger process of Indian Removal, which forced the Chickasaw people from their ancestral homeland and opened vast areas of northern Mississippi to incoming settlers and land speculators.
Records preserved by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History demonstrate how this transition occurred. The Chickasaw Cession Land Office Record Books, covering 1834 through 1846, identify individual landholdings, township boundaries, and property transactions, providing valuable evidence for reconstructing the region’s earliest settlement patterns. Marshall County’s surviving tax rolls begin in 1836 and offer another means of tracing the families who acquired property during these years.
One account of the nearby Early Grove community provides additional information about landownership around Slayden. In a history published in The South Reporter in November 1981, local historian R. B. Henderson described several sections of land belonging to a Chickasaw leader identified as Non-Konnah. According to Henderson, Non-Konnah sold land to the firm Anderson and Orne on October 7, 1836, and Edward Orne subsequently acquired property extending westward toward Slayden in April 1838. Henderson also recalled that Orne briefly operated a tavern near the crossroads before selling his holdings to later settlers.
Although these details would benefit from examination of the original deeds, Henderson’s account illustrates the rapid transformation of the area during the 1830s, when land previously controlled by the Chickasaw people passed into the hands of speculators, merchants, and farming families.
Four Families and the Founding of Gourd Neck
Much of what survives concerning Slayden’s earliest families comes from the research of Sallie Rhea Hurdle Brewer, a longtime history teacher who spent years collecting information about the community. Her recollections formed the foundation of several historical articles published in The South Reporter, including a feature appearing on April 24, 1986.
According to Brewer, four families played especially important roles in establishing the settlement: the Slaydens, Boswells, Watkinses, and Hurdles. These families reportedly traveled from the region of present-day Alamance County, North Carolina, around 1836, eventually settling in northern Marshall County. Alamance County itself was not established until 1849, so the families would have departed from territory that was then part of Orange County.
Brewer believed the families may have followed older Native American trails through Tennessee into northern Mississippi, although she acknowledged that the precise route remained uncertain. Her account also preserved the story of a widowed Mrs. Hurdle, whose husband died of pneumonia before the journey began. Accompanied by five sons and three daughters, she reportedly made the trip by ox cart, relying on the assistance of the other families as they established new homes.
Local tradition held that the newcomers acquired substantial tracts of land for approximately twenty-five cents per acre. The precise transactions and prices require confirmation through surviving land records, but the settlement stories describe families who established farms and began building a community around a network of rural roads.
The earliest remembered name for the settlement was Gourd Neck, and two different explanations survived concerning its origin. One tradition described a roadside well where travelers drank water using a long-handled gourd dipper, while another claimed that a passing salesman noticed a particularly impressive gourd vine growing along a fence and suggested the name. Neither explanation has been conclusively established through contemporary documentation, but both reflect the way local landmarks and everyday objects often became the names of small rural communities.
From Gourd Neck to Slayden’s Crossing
As settlement increased, the crossroads became a natural location for businesses serving farmers and travelers. In his November 25, 1965, account of nearby Old Lamar, R. B. Henderson described Gourd Neck as a village near the junction of the old Pontotoc Road and the Memphis and Tuscumbia Road. Other routes connected the settlement with Old Lamar, Holly Springs, and communities across the Tennessee border, making the surrounding road network an important part of its development.
The Slayden family operated one of the area’s earliest general stores, and the business eventually gave its name to the crossroads. Brewer recalled that the original merchant died around 1850, after which his son and a member of the Hurdle family formed a partnership that continued operating the establishment. The store subsequently passed through other owners, including S. J. Nicholson, before becoming associated with the Carpenter family.
Such businesses occupied an important place in rural communities because they provided more than merchandise. Farmers could obtain household necessities, exchange news, discuss crops, and maintain relationships with neighbors whose homes might be separated by considerable distances. Brewer also remembered that the community possessed an early horse-powered cotton gin, later replaced by a more modern gin during the early twentieth century.
By the final decades of the nineteenth century, the settlement was increasingly identified as Slayden’s Crossing. Historical postal compilations indicate that a post office operated under the name Slaydens Crossing from 1875 until 1904, when the official postal designation changed to Slayden. The post office reportedly continued until 1909.
A contemporary description appeared in Dunbar Rowland’s 1907 reference work, Mississippi: Comprising Sketches of Counties, Towns, Events, Institutions, and Persons. Rowland identified Slayden, or Slayden’s Crossing, as a small postal hamlet approximately twelve miles north of Holly Springs and reported a population of twenty-six in 1900. That figure described the small locality rather than the wider farming community, whose families occupied homes and agricultural properties throughout the surrounding countryside.
Alexandria Baptist Church and the Religious Life of Slayden
Churches became another defining feature of Slayden’s development, particularly Alexandria Baptist Church, which eventually became known as Slayden Baptist Church. A historical account published in 1986 placed the congregation’s organization in 1870 and described its earliest meeting place as a log building near the present Slayden Cemetery along the road toward Moscow, Tennessee.
Sallie Rhea Brewer’s recollections included descriptions of the original church building, which reportedly had entrances at opposite ends. Men and women entered through separate doors and sat on different sides of the congregation, a practice remembered as part of the church’s nineteenth-century religious customs.
Another account, based on the recollections of Eula Valentine Hurdle, credited her great-grandfather Alexander Valentine with establishing an early church at Slayden before the Civil War. This tradition differs from the 1870 organizational date found in Brewer’s history, suggesting that religious meetings or an earlier congregation may have preceded the formally remembered establishment of Alexandria Baptist Church. Without the original church minutes or property deeds, the precise relationship between these accounts remains uncertain.
As Slayden developed, the congregation moved from the cemetery area to a frame building along Lamar Road, east of the crossroads. The church’s name changed to Slayden Baptist in 1939, according to the Hurdle family account, and the construction of Highway 72 around 1940 prompted another relocation. A new brick church building was established on the opposite side of the highway, allowing the congregation to continue serving families whose religious and social lives had long been connected with the institution.
The church’s importance extended beyond regular worship. Family gatherings, youth activities, community celebrations, and charitable work made it an important institution in a settlement where residents depended heavily on local relationships.
Marshall County Agricultural High School and the Growth of Rural Education
One of the most significant developments in Slayden’s history was the establishment of the Marshall County Agricultural High School, also known as Slayden Agricultural High School. During the early twentieth century, Mississippi began expanding agricultural education to provide rural students with opportunities that had often been unavailable outside larger towns.
The Mississippi Legislature authorized a system of agricultural high schools beginning in 1908, with subsequent legislation addressing their organization and public support. These schools were intended to combine conventional academic instruction with practical training in farming, domestic science, and related occupations. The system developed within Mississippi’s racially segregated educational structure, which sharply restricted opportunities for African American students.
According to Brewer, J. M. Consley became an important organizer of the Slayden school around 1912, helping establish an institution that eventually became the center of educational and social activity in the community. The school offered boarding accommodations, allowing students from distant communities to attend classes while living on campus.
Contemporary federal government publications confirm the school’s existence and standing during these early years. Samuel Paul Capen’s Accredited Secondary Schools in the United States, published by the United States Bureau of Education in 1916, listed the institution as Slayden Agricultural High School under Lamar, Mississippi. The entry appeared among schools affiliated with the University of Mississippi for the 1916–1917 academic year.
A second federal bulletin, Institutions in the United States Giving Instruction in Agriculture, 1915–16, published in 1917, identified an agricultural school at Slayden, using Lamar as its postal address. By 1922, another Bureau of Education publication listed the institution explicitly as Marshall County Agricultural High School at Slayden, demonstrating its continued recognition within Mississippi’s secondary education system.
The school placed particular emphasis on practical experience. Brewer recalled that students maintained a dairy, laundry, gardens, orchard, and poultry operation, gaining instruction through responsibilities that contributed to the daily functioning of the institution. Students were reportedly compensated for some of their work, creating opportunities to earn money while developing agricultural and domestic skills.
The school’s reputation extended beyond Marshall County, with Brewer remembering students who came from Memphis and even as far away as New York. Although individual enrollment records would be needed to verify those accounts, the institution clearly played an important role in expanding educational opportunities for the rural communities it served.
A surviving photographic postcard of the school’s dormitory provides a rare contemporary image of the institution. Preserved in a diary dating between 1913 and 1918, the photograph offers tangible evidence of the boarding facilities that helped distinguish Slayden Agricultural High School from the smaller local schools common throughout the region.
A Dark Chapter in Slayden’s History: The Lynching of Ab Young
Not every chapter of Slayden’s history concerns the growth of its institutions or the accomplishments of its families. On March 12, 1935, the community became the scene of the lynching of Ab Young, an African American man accused of killing a white highway worker.
Contemporary newspaper accounts reported that Young had been captured in Rossville, Tennessee, before a white mob brought him across the state line into Mississippi. In Slayden, approximately fifty men participated in a lynching in which Young was hanged from a tree in a schoolyard. He was never afforded a trial for the crime of which he had been accused.
The killing attracted attention well beyond Marshall County. The Washington Tribune reported on March 23, 1935, that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had appealed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Attorney General Homer S. Cummings for federal action against those responsible. Newspaper commentary concerning the lynching was subsequently reproduced in the Congressional Record during the national debate over federal anti-lynching legislation.
Despite contemporary reports describing the mob and the circumstances surrounding Young’s death, local authorities claimed they could not identify the perpetrators. The killing became another example of the racial violence and failures of law enforcement that characterized the Jim Crow South, particularly during an era when efforts to enact federal anti-lynching protections faced determined political opposition.
Young’s death remains an essential part of Slayden’s historical record. Remembering the community’s schools, churches, and agricultural accomplishments must also involve acknowledging the racial injustice experienced by African Americans who lived and worked in the same region.
Farming, Family Businesses, and Everyday Life in Slayden
Agriculture remained the foundation of Slayden’s economy throughout much of the twentieth century, with cotton cultivation, livestock, and other crops supporting families whose properties often passed from one generation to the next. The Hurdle family became especially prominent in this agricultural landscape, maintaining extensive farming interests while participating in the community’s businesses, churches, and civic institutions.
In an article for The South Reporter, Beth Breithaupt interviewed Byron “Tootsie” Hurdle and his wife, Eula “Tump” Valentine Hurdle, whose memories provided a detailed picture of rural life during the 1930s and 1940s. Byron had been raised in Slayden, while Eula’s family connections extended across the Mississippi and Tennessee border. The couple met while attending school and married in 1942, eventually raising eight children.
Their account described an agricultural household in which families maintained chickens for eggs and meat, cows for milk and butter, and hogs for food, while vegetable gardens supplied produce for preserving and winter consumption. Many households produced necessities that were not commonly available through local stores, making home production an important part of everyday life.
The Hurdles continued farming on a substantial scale, with family operations producing cotton, soybeans, and milo while raising beef cattle. Breithaupt’s account described a farming business encompassing approximately six thousand acres at the time of the interview, illustrating how local agricultural enterprises had developed beyond the smaller operations remembered from earlier generations.
For young people, entertainment often centered on the agricultural high school and local churches. Basketball and softball games, school plays, social gatherings, and church activities provided opportunities for recreation in an era when automobiles were less accessible to younger residents. The school therefore served not only as an educational institution but also as the center of much of the community’s cultural life.
Modern services gradually altered these routines. Brewer credited J. M. Consley with helping bring telephone service to Slayden in 1943, an improvement that strengthened connections between homes, farms, and businesses. Highway 72 also transformed transportation, gradually making travel toward Holly Springs, Memphis, and other regional centers more convenient.
By the late 1980s, contemporary descriptions identified a community served by grocery businesses, a bank, automotive services, a gasoline station, and a cotton gin. Although many residents continued farming, others traveled to employment in Memphis, Collierville, Moscow, or Holly Springs, reflecting the growing relationship between rural northern Mississippi and the expanding Memphis metropolitan area.
The End of the Boarding School and the Era of Desegregation
By the middle of the twentieth century, the original agricultural high school model was changing. Improved roads, school transportation, and countywide educational planning reduced the need for residential agricultural institutions, and Slayden’s dormitories reportedly closed during the early 1950s. The school continued operating as part of the Marshall County educational system, but its earlier identity as a boarding institution gradually disappeared.
The most consequential changes came during the struggle to desegregate Mississippi’s public schools. Federal court orders required districts to dismantle the racially separated educational systems that had existed for generations, forcing Marshall County to reorganize student assignments and school operations.
A later historical study by David Marcos Callejo-Perez, drawing on contemporary newspaper reports, documented the effects of desegregation in Marshall County during 1970. Enrollment figures published after February 1 of that year recorded Slayden as a school serving grades seven through nine, with twenty-four white students and two hundred Black students enrolled. Nearby Sand Flat School served other grade levels as the county reorganized its educational system.
These figures provide an important contrast with the earlier history of Slayden Agricultural High School. The educational institution that had once represented the expansion of opportunities for rural white students was becoming part of a reorganized public school system shaped by the civil rights movement and the long struggle for equal educational access.
The agricultural high school’s former identity came to an end during the early 1970s, although educational use of the property continued through the transition. Later accounts described portions of the former school property being sold, with Slayden Baptist Church acquiring the gymnasium, vocational building, and approximately ten acres. These facilities were adapted for church and community activities, preserving part of the institution’s physical presence even after its original educational mission had ended.
The school’s importance to former students remained evident in the following decades. Reunions held in 1985 and 1986 reportedly attracted more than five hundred former students and teachers each year, bringing together generations of people who had attended classes, participated in athletic events, and lived in the dormitories.
Volunteer Fire Protection and Community Cooperation
As Slayden entered the final decades of the twentieth century, residents continued organizing institutions to meet local needs. Among the most important was the Slayden-Marshall County Volunteer Fire Department, which formally incorporated on April 16, 1980, and organized on April 29 of that year.
The original state record, preserved by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, identifies Alan Hurdle as the department’s first president, Henry DeVore as vice president, and Dick Sanders as secretary-treasurer. Other founding directors included Michael Cunningham, B. T. Hunsucker Jr., Herbert Wilburn, Luke Loftin, and Campbell Tell.
The establishment of the fire department reflected the practical importance of local cooperation in a rural settlement where emergency services could not always be provided as quickly as those available in larger municipalities. Former school facilities also played a role in its operations, illustrating how buildings originally constructed for education continued serving new purposes as community needs changed.
For residents who remembered the days of horse-powered cotton gins and limited telephone service, such developments represented substantial changes. Slayden remained a small rural community, but improvements in transportation, communication, public safety, and local services gradually altered the character of everyday life.
The Tornado of April 3, 2025
More recently, Slayden experienced another defining event when a powerful tornado passed through northern Marshall County during the early morning hours of April 3, 2025. The National Weather Service in Memphis later rated the tornado EF3, estimating peak winds of approximately 160 miles per hour along its nearly forty-mile path through Mississippi and Tennessee.
The tornado touched down southwest of Slayden near Highway 311 before moving northeast through the surrounding countryside. Damage surveys documented uprooted trees, destroyed portions of homes, and extensive damage along roads including Hurdle Club Road, Hogan Road, and South Slayden Road. The tornado then crossed Highway 72 east of the community before continuing toward Benton County and Tennessee.
The aftermath brought another demonstration of Slayden’s longstanding tradition of community assistance. Slayden Baptist Church became a center for disaster relief, with the American Red Cross and other organizations providing food and assistance to residents affected by the storm. The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency specifically identified the church as one of the locations where survivors continued receiving services during the recovery effort.
For a community whose history had repeatedly centered on churches, schools, and neighbors working together, the response to the tornado reflected a familiar pattern. Institutions that had served earlier generations through educational programs, religious gatherings, and civic activities once again provided a place where residents could turn during a period of hardship.
Remembering the History of Slayden
The history of Slayden is much larger than the size of the community might suggest. Its earliest development followed the displacement of the Chickasaw people and the rapid settlement of northern Mississippi during the 1830s. The families who established farms along the old crossroads eventually gave rise to a network of businesses and religious institutions, while the agricultural high school transformed Slayden into an educational center that served students from well beyond the surrounding countryside.
Its history also contains the difficult realities of racial violence and segregation, including the lynching of Ab Young in 1935 and the educational changes brought about by desegregation decades later. These events belong alongside the accounts of pioneering families, churches, teachers, farmers, and community organizations because all contributed to the history of the place.
Much of this story survives because local residents took the time to preserve it. Sallie Rhea Hurdle Brewer’s historical research, the recollections of the Hurdle and Valentine families, and the articles written by R. B. Henderson and other local historians recorded details that might otherwise have disappeared. Federal education reports, land records, historic newspapers, photographs, and official government documents provide additional evidence that allows those memories to be studied alongside contemporary records.
Today, Slayden remains connected to its agricultural past, even as modern highways and regional development have transformed the surrounding landscape. Its history is preserved in family stories, cemetery inscriptions, surviving buildings, newspaper archives, and the memory of a school that once stood at the center of community life. From Gourd Neck to Slayden’s Crossing, the settlement’s changing names reflect the larger story of a rural Mississippi community that developed over nearly two centuries while retaining connections to the people and institutions that shaped its identity.
Sources & Further Reading
Breithaupt, Beth. “Hurdle Family Makes Difference in Slayden.” The South Reporter, n.d. Reproduced by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/locales/histslay.php.
Capen, Samuel Paul. Accredited Secondary Schools in the United States. Bureau of Education Bulletin 1916, no. 20. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-I16-d82e7cf046af9b5393da3218cae56dbe/pdf/GOVPUB-I16-d82e7cf046af9b5393da3218cae56dbe.pdf.
Callejo-Perez, David Marcos. “Schools and the Formation of Black Identity during the Civil Rights Movement: Change and Resistance in Holly Springs, Mississippi, 1964–1974.” EdD diss., Florida International University, 2000. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/record/8602.
Carpenter, Edwina. “Railroad, Fire Highlighted Old & New Lamar History.” The South Reporter, April 29, 1982. Reproduced by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/locales/lamarold.php.
“Four Families from Carolina Settled the Slayden Area.” The South Reporter, April 24, 1986, 8. Reproduced by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/locales/histslay.php.
Henderson, R. B. “Historic Church Building Replaced with New Structure at Early Grove.” The South Reporter, November 19, 1981. Reproduced by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/locales/histegc.php.
Henderson, R. B. “Old Lamar Settled by Wealthy Planters.” The South Reporter, November 25, 1965. Reproduced by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/locales/lamarold.php.
Lusher, Henry M. Map of the Lands in Mississippi Ceded by the Chickasaws to the United States in 1832 and 1834. Boston: Pendleton’s Lithography, 1835. Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Historical Maps Collection. https://da.mdah.ms.gov/series/maps/detail/191104.
Marshall County Genealogical Society. “Marshall Co. Agricultural HS Slayden Graduates 1922.” Marshall County Genealogical Society Quarterly 8, no. 1 (Winter 2002). Publication index reproduced by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://www.msgw.org/marshall/records/gensoc2.php.
Marshall County MSGenWeb. “Cities/Towns: Historical Communities and Place Names of Marshall County, Mississippi.” Accessed November 14, 2026. https://msgw.org/marshall/locales/cities.php.
Marshall County MSGenWeb. “Marshall County Schools.” Historical school directory and photographic documentation of the Marshall County Agricultural High School dormitory. Accessed November 14, 2026. https://msgw.org/marshall/schools/schools.php.
Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Chickasaw Cession Land Office Record Books, 1834–1846. Collection Z/2077. Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History. https://finding.mdah.ms.gov/manuscripts/z2077000.
Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Educable Children Records, Marshall County, 1916–1932. Series 0355. Mississippi Digital Archives. https://da.mdah.ms.gov/series/osa/355/marshall-county.
Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Marshall County Tax Rolls, 1836–1896. Series 1202. Mississippi Digital Archives. https://da.mdah.ms.gov/series/osa/s1202/marshall.
Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Records of Organization of Corporations, 1906–1987. Series 0069, Book 13. Includes the Slayden-Marshall County Volunteer Fire Department, April 1980. Mississippi Digital Archives. https://da.mdah.ms.gov/series/sos/s0069.
Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. “April 2–6, 2025, Severe Weather Update #2.” April 8, 2025. https://www.msema.org/news/april-2-6-2025-severe-weather-update-2.
Monahan, A. C., and C. H. Dye. Institutions in the United States Giving Instruction in Agriculture, 1915–16. Bureau of Education Bulletin 1917, no. 34. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1917. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Institutions_in_the_United_States_Giving_Instruction_in_Agriculture_1915-16._Bulletin_1917%2C_No._34_%28IA_institutionsinun00mona%29.pdf.
National Archives and Records Administration. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Microfilm Publication M841, Record Group 28. Washington, DC: National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html.
National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126, Record Group 28. Washington, DC: National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html.
National Weather Service, Memphis, Tennessee. “April 2–5, 2025 Severe Weather Outbreak.” Includes the April 3, 2025 Slayden–Grand Junction EF3 tornado damage survey. https://www.weather.gov/meg/april252025severeweatheroutbreak.
“Negro Lynched in Slayden, Miss., by Mob Tuesday.” La Grande Evening Observer, March 13, 1935, 1. University of Oregon Historic Oregon Newspapers. https://oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/2006260039/1935-03-13/ed-1/seq-1/.
Otto, Judith P. “An Historian’s View of Slayden: Past and Present Peaceful.” The South Reporter, n.d. Reproduced by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/locales/histslay.php.
“Roosevelt Is Asked to Act in Third Lynching and Kidnaping.” Washington Tribune, March 23, 1935. Digitized by Dangerous Press, with Library of Congress source access. https://dangerouspress.org/papers/washington-tribune/1935-03-23.
Rowland, Dunbar, ed. Mississippi: Comprising Sketches of Counties, Towns, Events, Institutions, and Persons. Vol. 2. Atlanta: Southern Historical Publishing Association, 1907. https://ldsgenealogy.com/MS/books/Mississippi-comprising-sketches-of-towns-events-institutions-and-persons-arranged-in-cyclopedic-form-Vol-II-part-82.htm.
Zook, George F. Accredited Secondary Schools in the United States. Bureau of Education Bulletin 1922, no. 11. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1922, 44. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/Accredited_Secondary_Schools_in_the_United_States._Bulletin_1922%2C_No._11_%28IA_accreditedsecond00bure%29.pdf.
Author Note: The history of Slayden reminds us that even the smallest rural communities preserve stories of migration, education, hardship, and generations of families who helped shape the surrounding countryside. If you have photographs, school records, family histories, or personal memories of Slayden and its agricultural high school, I welcome your contributions to help preserve this community’s history for future generations.