Dr. Ransom helped keep Arcola School alive

For The Madera Tribune

Arcola School in 1926.

---

“I always look back upon the days I spent in Arcola School as among the happiest and most profitable of my life, and I always feel a sense of reverence for the Arcola School of old, whenever I pass the present one”

— Dr. Dow Ransom, 1938.

With these words, one of Madera’s most highly respected physicians paid homage to the first school he attended upon arriving here as a 12-year-old lad in 1892, and in doing so, he helped keep an old man’s dream alive.

The name of Arcola was first brought to the San Joaquin Valley in 1868 because a pioneer named Samuel Strudwick loved the South. He had been born at Arcola — his family plantation in Alabama. His ante-bellum existence could have provided the background for “Gone with the Wind,” with its mint juleps, Spanish moss, and ante-bellum mansion. Then came the Civil War and Strudwick’s world turned upside down. He decided to leave his ancestral home for Fresno County. At the same time, however, he determined that Arcola would never be forgotten.