Class of '65 Reunion Bus Tour
Article by Valerie Sliker, Courtesy Wagener Monthly

The A. L. Corbett High School Class of 1965 celebrated their 50^th reunion on Friday, June 5, 2015 through Sunday, June 7^th, 2015.  Back in the day, the school did not have the funds to publish yearbooks and the class lamented the fact that they had no yearbooks to look back on, so they created one, a current one, the A. L. Corbett High School Class of 1965 – Fiftieth Class Reunion which they gave to each classmate at the reunion.

The Class of ’65 was the last group to have attended one room schoolhouses before the state consolidated into multiroom structures in 1954.  In light of this significance, they thought it was important to place this memory book in the Wagener Library, the Wagener Museum, the A. L. Corbett Middle School and the Aiken County Museum where it is available to the public.

Thirty-nine students graduated from A. L. Corbett High School in 1965.  Most of them had transferred there in seventh grade and had come from the Sardis Elementary School in Salley, SC.  Sardis was built in 1954 when the state consolidated one and two room schoolhouses into multiroom structures.  The one room elementary schools in our area also included Cedar Grove, Friendship, Gum Ridge, Jerusalem Branch, Oaki Nora, Ocean Grove, Perry, Piney Grove School (in the Skillet), Round Top Colored, Snowville, Union Academy, Union Hill, and Wagener Colored Elementary.

Sardis taught black students from first grade through sixth and was a feeder school for the A. L. Corbett High School in Wagener.  Sardis Elementary closed in 1974, soon after school integration in 1970, and its students were bused to A. L. Corbett.