FREDERICKTOWN – The Fredericktown High School Alumni Association announced that a fully endowed scholarship has been established to honor the lives of Clyde and Edna Boyd and their deep commitment to Fredericktown schools over many years.
The Clyde & Edna Boyd Scholarship, which will first be awarded to a 2022 Fredericktown High School (FHS) graduate, is being sponsored by their daughters, who provided the following memories and insights on their parents’ lives.
Clyde, one of the 12 children born to his parents in Saltville, Va., moved with the family to the Mount Vernon area when he was young, and he had no schooling beyond eighth grade. But he was an avid reader, and when it came time to marry, he chose a schoolteacher who was introduced to him by one of her students. A native of Knox County, Edna graduated from Mount Vernon High School in 1924 and enrolled at Kent State, when it was a Normal School for teacher training. At the time of their marriage in 1927, she was teaching in the one-room Green Valley School, and Clyde was trucking produce from Cleveland to Mount Vernon. She stopped teaching to raise a family, and he continued to do some trucking while gradually turning to farming. In 1942, Clyde and Edna purchased a farm 3 miles north of town on Route 13 and went wholeheartedly into the dairy business with a herd of registered Guernseys. The sign on their mailbox, Ric-To-Lee-Lo Farm, underscored the center of their lives: their four children (Richard, Tom, Betty Lee and Lois.)
In the late 1940s, when school buses were owner-operated, Clyde began driving a route that began at his farm. In 1953, Edna returned to teaching, this time in Fredericktown, where her first-grade class met at improvised quarters in the Methodist Church because the school building on Taylor Street lacked space. By 1974, when Edna retired, she and Clyde had participated in the schooling of hundreds of students and seen all four of their children graduated from FHS: Richard in 1950, Tom in 1953, Betty in 1956 and Lois in 1958.
All four valued their parents’ guidance and commitments. Richard and Tom followed in Clyde’s footsteps, and after taking over the small lime and fertilizer business that he started, they expanded it into what became B&B Farm Services. Betty and Lois looked to their mother’s example and became teachers.
Recognizing how Fredericktown schools provided teachers who cared about students and an environment that nurtured achievement, the family is offering this small scholarship with the hope of helping other FHS grads proceed toward their goals.
