Cooleemee's Old Wood School stood on a corner lot facing east on Watts Street and extending to Duke Street. Local classes had been held as early as 1899 in a mill house on Main Street, and the foundation for this school was laid in 1901, with its official opening in December of 1902. Its first principal was J.B. Craven, a Methodist minister, and its student body numbered 160 students. Professor J.D. Hodges, Miss Rosa Tatum, and others served as principals over the years. The school was a two-story frame building with eight classrooms, an assembly hall also used for chapel, pot-bellied stoves in each room that Cooleemee boys fired each morning, outdoor toilets in the rear yard, and a cast iron pump that provided water drunk from a gourd or a tin dipper. It was a major step forward for education in Davie County and was Jerusalem Township's seventh public school. Erwin Mills built and maintained the school, and in 1906 Erwin Mills General Manager T.V. Terrell, mill bookkeeper J.W. Zachary, and farmer W.H. Hobson served on the Jerusalem Township School Board. The school drew white students from the surrounding countryside as well as the mill village. High school graduations began as early as 1908, when six scholars received diplomas for completing eleven years of schooling. Former students recalled that their teachers were all called "Miss," and many of those teachers lived at the Riverside Hotel on Cross Street; among the beloved teachers were Rosa Tatum, Mary Eliza Hudson, Creola Wilson, Emma Grimes, and Grace Coley. After the New Brick School was built on Marginal Street in 1923, the Old Wood School continued to be used for grades 1-3, and at one time so many students attended that a nearby mill house and a tar-papered building were also used. Hundreds upon hundreds of students who studied there went on to become literate and productive citizens, and North Carolina historian Hugh T. Lefler received his first years of education there.