Jackson Springs History

Legend has it that Jackson Springs history started when a mineral spring was discovered by a hunter named Jackson who, while tracking a wounded deer during extremely dry weather, discovered a very damp place where the deer had gone to die. Kicking the leaves aside, Jackson found a huge brown rock with water flowing from a crevice in it. The water, when tested later, proved to be mineral water and won second place for the best medicinal water in America at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.

A town grew around the spring with a hotel, a 9-hole golf course, tennis courts, a large lake with an electric plant that lit the 100 hotel rooms as well as the annex. As many as six trains per day backed into Jackson Springs from West End, bringing guests for the resort and taking the jugs and carboys of water out to other destinations. As soon as school was dismissed each year, whole families arrived. The town soon had a drug store, a hardware store, a bowling alley, a barbershop, a cotton gin, a post office, and an early “filling station”.

The town was incorporated in 1921 and was laid out in a perfect square with each side two miles long and the spring in the middle. For entertainment there was boating, swimming at the lake, croquet, golfing, tennis, dancing in the pavilion at the spring with a “name orchestra”, and also square dancing, horseback riding, bridge, checkers and other games. Some of the famous guests were John Phillip Sousa, Annie Oakley and her husband, and Charles Brantley Aycock.

In 1817 the Presbyterian Church was founded but not organized with officers until 1819. The first church building was built in 1820; the second building was built at a cost of $575 in 1853. The present sanctuary is that 1853 building with a wing added in the late 1940’s and another in the early 1990’s. In 1899 the name was changed from Mineral Spring church to Jackson Springs Church and it is believed that the plurality of springs came about because of the discovery that there are two separate springs in the big brown rock. Forty ministers have been installed to serve the church with numerous others who served as Interim ministers.

The earliest school actually in Jackson Springs history was the Academy started in 1840 by the Rev. Hugh McLaurin, the minister of the church. In the latter half of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century there had been several small schools nearby that had educated the children of Jackson Springs. After the Rev. McLaurin moved to Georgia, Professor Nevin Daniels Josephus Clark, one of the earliest graduates of the University of North Carolina, became the teacher and guided the school into the 20th century. It closed during the Civil War to allow N.D.J. Clark to serve in the Confederate Army, but he reopened it after the war and operated it until just before Jackson Springs High School opened in 1915. His students came from miles around and boarded in the community homes.

Jackson Springs High School and Elise Academy in Robbins were at one time the only two accredited high schools in Moore County. Each student in the county must spend at least his or her senior year at one of these two schools in order to be graduated from an accredited school. Students boarded in homes, lived in the dormitory, or groups rented a house together and a teacher or the principal stayed in the house also. The first graduating class of Jackson Springs High School was the Class of 1919 with four female members. The last official graduating class was the Class of 1927. The high school had been consolidated with either West End High in Moore County or Candor High in Montgomery.

A very few determined students wanted a Jackson Springs diploma and refused to go to either Candor or West End. The last high school principal, Thaddeus N. Frye, agreed to stay with the seven or eight and teach their senior year. This must have been a clandestine school. A member of that Class of 1928, now deceased, told about it; a grade school student now living in Florida, remembers that during his sixth grade year, “something odd” was happening in the upper dormitory. He remembered seeing people go in and out of the building during the day and his class and the other elementary grades were given very definite instructions that they were NEVER TO GO NEAR THAT BUILDING when out for recess.

T.N. Frye, who later became the principal of Candor High School, has a missing year in his educational career between his employment in Moore County at Jackson Springs and his next employment in Montgomery County. Nelson Frye, son of T.N. Frye, said that is exactly the sort of thing his dad would have done—help someone who needed (or wanted) help.

The school existed as an elementary school until the spring of 1931 when the school was completely closed and all students then went to West End School. The central high school building was bought by the community and remodeled. It is presently the Community Center and meeting place of the Jackson Springs Community Club.

The advent of the automobile, which allowed people to go to the mountains or the beach for vacations, and the Depression of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s plus the 1932 fire that destroyed the hotel finished the resort of Jackson Springs. Today, only the post office, the church and a building of the high school remain. But the community of people who call Jackson Springs home is alive and well in the 21st Century creating more Jackson Springs history.

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