I recently found this picture of my Grandfather's first school. I was surprised that there were so many students in that small area of rural Missouri in the late 1890s. This was a bit different from the one room school I attended in the 1940s.I began school in a two story, brick box of a city school with a large metal fire escape from the second floor. I loved school and my teacher, but didn't like to walk past the big, black chow on the way to school. He only seemed to bark at me when I walked by myself. We moved to an acreage south of town in 1945, April 15, 1945 to be exact. I remember we turned on a radio after getting moved in and heard that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died that day. My two brothers and I were enrolled in the one room school the next day.
The school was three quarters of a mile from the house and we walked or later rode bicycles to school. In winter we were instructed not to play in the snow on the way to school but could on the way home as we could change into dry clothes.
This was a white, clapboard school for grades one through eight. The school was situated on a large piece of land with a yard full of large oak trees. The school house is long gone and a Wal-Mart shopping center is on the property but some of the oak trees have been retained. One of the last one room school in the county, this served as a community meeting house for 4-H clubs and a non-denominational Sunday school. The property was large enough for group games of kick ball, Red Rover, Ducks and Geese, plus swings and a teeter-totter. There was an outhouse in each corner of the property behind the school.
The day we arrived, there were a couple of horses tied to the fence on the north side of the school. One of the boys in that family was in 8th grade and was needed on the family farm as soon as school was out. It was an unusually cold day for April, in Missouri, the day we arrived as the students were sitting in their coats around the big "pot-bellied" stove. Inside the front door were two small rooms on either side of the door for coats, lunch boxes and supplies. All the desks were fastened together in single rows ranging from the smallest to adult size with our backs to the south windows. There were no windows on the north side of the building. The teacher, Mrs. H. was seated in the center at the front of the room. Since she was near the stove, the temperature of the room depended on her comfort.There were few students in each class and we all got the benefits of the lessons from the other classes. My class consisted of four girls. Much of the school work was done on the chalkboard. Since we had done very little of this type of participation in the city school, we received some chuckles from the other students as we attempted this exercise.
Mrs. H was afraid of storms, snakes and the dark of night and taught us to be also. My brother was assigned the job of checking out the outhouses before each recess to be sure there were no snakes hiding there. We did see an occasional copperhead in the oak leaves of the playground or around the outhouses. One spring a storm was threatening and Mrs. H decided she needed to get home before the storm so sent all of us home, walking of course. Our parents and baby sister had gone to the grandparents for the day and were a bit upset to find us there sitting around the table playing board games. We did have a large basement but only one time did I remember the family going down there during a storm.
Once my younger brother got into trouble with Mrs. H. I never did know the problem but she sent my older brother out to get a switch. The switch was never used but little brother was assured that evening that it would have broken had she hit him with it.
After these and other similar incidents it was decided Mrs. H should retire. We had two other more creative and caring teachers during my time there.
We had reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, art classes with crafts and some identification of famous paintings, memorization of poems and to teach to the test, I guess, we had to learn to identify the breeds of sheep, cows and pigs. I still have the copy of the 8th grade exam and, sure enough,we had to name them!
We always had Christmas and end of the year programs with poems, skits, etc., I remember how embarrassed I was when the four girls in my class had to jump rope to the tune of "Whispering". We had paper flowers tied all along the jump rope.
We spent a Saturday at the end of the 8th grade to take the exam and the end of the year program provided us with a graduation exercise. One mother made each of us taffeta dresses, all different pastel colors, with a long waist, huge sash and bow! Mine was yellow.
After 8th grade we had to ride the school bus to town for junior and senior high school. One morning the bus got stuck in a snow drift and we didn't make it to school until almost noon. We were the the first to get on the bus each morning at 7:00 a.m. and the last in the afternoon getting home about 4:30.
The curriculum in this one room school was sufficient for us to compete academically in the city schools but socially I had a difficult time adjusting. I'm glad, however, that I had this one room, basic, education.
