This past Bigheart Day in 2014, I attended the annual almuni meeting at the High School. This was my second year to present some history of Bigheart/Barnsdall. For this years meeting, I chose to do a video on the history of the Barnsdall school system. The project started last September 2013 by gathering information and material for the video. With thousands of photos in my hands I began organizing them into a video along with the information to go along with them. With everything organized, I began making the video on the first of January. Working the first weekend in January, I finally had the first 18 seconds of the introduction finished. In all, around 24 hours of work went into those few seconds. As January turned into February, I realized that the final cut on the video would be about 2 hours in length. At that point I began thinking about cutting much of it out but went ahead with the original plan. February rolled into late March and it became apparent that the video would not be finished in time to be presented at the alumni meeting. The video at that time only was finished up to 1940. It was at that point I decide to edit the video severely and add in more years to get in as much information and photos as I could. Working on the video whenever I could, I managed to get up to the year 1980 but with major editing. The final result was finished three days prior to it's showing at the alumni meeting. The heavily edited version would be 18:45 in length. In January 2015, I decided to once again edit the video showing the first 55 years of the schools existence cutting it back to about 16 minutes. The school began in 1905 with the construction of a small wood frame building on a lot provided by T.E. Gibson, Bigheart Bank cashier at the south west corner of Vine and Third Street. 1906 would be the completion of the first year of school in Bigheart. The building would be the main school for the town until a new stone building was constructed in 1910. In 1911, the wood frame school was demolished by a tornado that swept through Bigheart. The lot would remain empty until it was purchased by the Fire Baptized Holiness Association in 1916.
It's my intention to conclude the video with the following 55 years of school history ending in 2015. It will take time to gather and edit the information into a video. When finished, a copy of the whole video will be given to the Barnsdall School Library. When uploaded to You Tube the first half of the video will be able to be viewed and a link will be posted on the Barnsdall History Page and here
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| Students walk the hall in 1958 |
The boy on the left is my Uncle Milton Smith.
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