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8. The Oldest Still-Open School in Williamson County is in Brentwood
The first school in Brentwood was Boiling Springs Academy, which opened in 1833 on what is now Moores Lane. The building, which is still standing, taught three levels of education and each ‘grade’ lasted about six months and cost between $8 and $14 dollars tuition per level. It closed in the early 1900s.
But the oldest school that still operates is Lipscomb School, now known as Lipscomb Elementary on Concord Road. Battle Ground Academy in Franklin, founded in 1891, might be the oldest still operating high school but Lipscomb has it beat by nearly 30 years.
Founded in the late 1860s by William Lipscomb, brother of Lipscomb University founder David Lipscomb, the school started out as a log cabin.
Students, according to local historians, came from as far away as Kentucky and Alabama, boarding with nearby families. Founded in the wake of the Civil War, which left the education system of local academies a bit in shambles, Lipscomb attempted to rebuild it. Going from first grade through high school, its subjects included Latin and advanced geometry.
William Lipscomb left the school in the 1890s to join his brother in running the university and the school was integrated into the developing county system. The old log cabin was torn down and replaced with a larger one room construction; later a kitchen was added. In 1948, the school was again torn down and replaced with a three-room brick schoolhouse. A fire in 1958 led to another reconstruction, basically the same one still in use today. Several additions and renovations have taken place, but essentially the Lipscomb Elementary of today remains the same underlying skeleton.
