Inquirer: Retired educator wants to rescue Bibb City Elementary

Schools are special places to Mike Edmondson.

That is no surprise to those who know the renowned and retired educator. Edmondson taught for about 35 years in the Muscogee County School District at Spencer, Hardaway and Northside high schools. Along the way he was named the county's Teacher of the Year, among many other distinctions.

"Next to churches, I think schools are the most sacred spaces there are," Edmondson told me.

The particular school we were talking about at the time was Bibb City Elementary School. Edmondson neither went there nor taught there, but he recently became interested in the 100-year-old building when he noticed that it is apparently not being taken care of.

Bibb Elementary closed its doors in 2001, but it's still the property of the school district. So Edmondson contacted the district, which indicated they would be interested in getting it off their hands and arranged a walk-through of what parts can still be walked through.

What Edmondson saw wasn't encouraging, but it wasn't enough to make him lose hope of restoring it. Parts of the roof have collapsed, letting the elements in where elements are not supposed to be. That, in turn, has caused some floors and ceilings to collapse. The basement had 3 feet of water and tons of black mold in it, he said.

Edmondson started doing his homework on the building and plotting a way to rescue it. Somewhere along that line, he met and teamed up with Sandi Lee, a Bibb resident who lives near the school and has also been on a mission to see the building saved and restored.

Just a week or two ago, Lee called Edmondson and told him neighbors had heard a tremendous crash from within the building. We don't need another walk-through to see that more of the upper interior is now part of the lower interior. From the accompanying picture, you can see that looking into the right-side front door, the sky is visible.

The photo was taken when I met up with Edmondson, Lee and Tyler Allen of 2WR Architecture, a former student of Edmondson's who accompanied him on the earlier walk-through. We walked around outside the building and talked about its prospects.

Tyler said his assessment is very preliminary and they'll have to get structural engineers in there to more accurately diagnose the patient's prospects. But he said from what he can see, the exterior brick shell of the building is sound and should hold up if the building were carefully gutted and a new steel interior structure were erected.

He estimated -- and again he prefaced it by saying this is a seat-of-the-pants early assessment -- that it would cost about $3.2 million to do the job.

Folks, this structure is historic and vitally relevant to one of the most genuine cultures in the city's history, the mill village culture.

It was built in 1915 by the Bibb Manufacturing Co., the closed-down mill that famously burned in 2008, and generations of the children of mill workers were educated there. Bibb Elementary represented the best, if not the only, chance for those kids to rise above their modest beginnings and go on to bigger and better things.

The campus includes a good-sized out-building (the Kindergarten Building) that's in much better shape than the main building.

And I'm told that on the southwest corner of the property, the Bibb City swimming pool once cooled the village kids down.

It's worth saving.

But for what purpose? Edmondson said it could house a senior citizen services center, possibly with a gerontology clinic. Folks in The Bibb aren't getting any younger, after all. (No offense, Rick and Marquette.)

Actually, that's not altogether true.

More and more younger people are investing in and moving into the little village. And they could benefit from a mill culture museum where they could learn about the roots of the place they're investing in. That, Edmondson said, could certainly be part of the project.

Edmondson and Lee hope to establish a non-profit organization dedicated to saving Bibb Elementary, and they welcome anyone who is interested in pitching in. If you're interested, contact them at savebibbcityelementary@yahoo.com or contact me (see below) and I'll forward your info to them.

Meanwhile, if you are a Bibb Elementary alum and have any interesting stories or observations (or maybe old pictures) contact me at the paper.

This story is far from being over.

Seen something that needs attention? Contact me at 706-571-8570 or mowen@ledger-enquirer.com.

This story was originally published January 3, 2016 at 10:11 PM with the headline "Inquirer: Retired educator wants to rescue Bibb City Elementary ."