A.C. Beasley, member of the Ozone School Board and Howard Troyer, school bus driver with the surplus army ambulance that served as bus from Garber to Salus, where the students got on a regular school bus to continue on to Ozone School.-------------------------------------------------------------------
Schools have changed so many ways thru the years. One of the big changes is the school buses. A big part of the school system now is the bus garages, shops, and yellow buses of various sizes.
On upper Little Piney Creek in northern Johnson Co. Arkansas there were three schools. The first was Ozone, then Mt. Pleasant and about four miles down the creek was the Union School House at Mt. Levi. There were no buses, children walked or rode their horses. The Mt. Pleasant school was a log building near the creek just before you came to G.W. Warren's farm. When the Mt. Pleasant school house burned, Alexander Beasley donated land and helped build a new school building between Warren's farm and the Beasley farm. By 1940-41 there were only two children attending Mt. Pleasant, Jessie Beasley and her niece Nedra Casey. The school was closed and the girls were taken to Union School by bus. The bus was a pickup owned and driven by Richard Bean whose wife Velma, was the teacher at Union.
In September 1947 Union School was donated to the Union Community as the students were then attending Lamar Schools except for those from the Mt. Pleasant school district. Jesus and Nedra were being transported from Garber to Salus in a jeep belong to Truman Warren. At Salus they transferred from the jeep to a school bus and on to Ozone School.
A.C. Beasley of Garber represented the Mt Pleasant school area on the Ozone School Board.
The jeep was no longer large enough to hold Jessie and Nedra and the students it picked up from the Rosetta Mountain area enroute to Salus. Mr. Beasley requested a bigger bus. One day he went to Clarksville and he was brought home by Howard Troyer in a 'retired' army ambulance.
The ambulance was the new school bus and Mr. Troyer the bus driver who took the students to Salus each morning and returned them to their homes each evening.
Today there are no school buses going up the Little Piney Road to Ozone. No children live there where back in the 1840's people were moving in from the east to establish homes and fulfill dreams of owning their own farms. By 1940 many had left during the great depression to find jobs and more left during WWII. ....today most of the farms are part of the Ozark National Forest, no one lives on upper Little Piney Creek. Where once there were communities of people living, today there are a few private cabins and campsites with hunters and four wheelers everywhere. The families have come and gone. The schools, Ozone, Mt. Pleasant and Union are gone and the villages- Garber with it's PO, grist mill, blacksmith shop, store and Mt. Levi where a store, PO, gas pump and doctor lived are also gone. Ozone is still there and a big yellow bus picks up the school children and takes them down a blacktopped road to school in Clarksville. The students from Union ride a yellow school bus to Lamar but there was never a school bus at the Mt. Pleasant school.
postscript: . The Union Community has been reorganized and in Feburary 2011 the Union School House was named to the National Register of Historical Places. The Mt. Pleasant school
burnt years ago and Ozone school is used by the community.
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