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Home : Quarterly Archives : Volume 24 |
Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society |
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Source: October 1986 Volume 24 Number 4, Pages 151–158 The One-Room School TopEleanor Wilson Dunwoody I never expected to be a school teacher: it was the last thing in the world I thought of. It was in the middle of October 1914 that Mrs. R. S. MacNamee, who was the wife of the supervisory principal at that time, came down to the farm to see my mother and me. I thought she had just come to call, but after talking for a short time she turned to me and asked how I would like to have a teaching job. I just looked at her! I had just finished high school that summer, and had not had any other education. I said, "I'm not prepared to teach. What are you talking about?" Then she told ire that the Salem School, over on Yellow Springs Road near Devault, was overcrowded. About fifteen or twenty little children -- Hungarians and Italians and a few others -- had come in from Devault, and there was no place for them even to sit because the room was full, with every seat occupied. Miss Emma Wersler was the teacher there at that time, and she stood it until the middle cf October, but then she determined that she couldn't keep it up -- and I don't blame her. When they couldn't find anybody else, Mrs. MacNamee asked me if I would take the job. I asked her, "What do I have to do?" "Well, you'll have to goto the County Superintendent's office," she said, "and take an examination." I said, "What in?" She told me, "All the subjects. I really wish you'd do it," she said. She was really very serious about it. So I said, "Well, I'll try, but I don't know what I'm getting myself into or what is expected of me." So I went to the Superintendent's office in West Chester and took the examination. I could get just a yearly certificate -- it was good for only one year -- because I wasn't qualified as a permanent teacher. So I got that, and went up to the Salem School. I had to be driven up there because it was too far away for me to walk. There was no room for me to teach in the school, but the Salem Methodist Church was next door, and they gave us permission to open it up and use the Sunday School room. They put in some desks and chairs, and a table for me. I didn't have a desk. So I started in there, only a couple of weeks after I had the examination! Then I stopped and asked myself, "What am I supposed to teach?" And I realized that first graders aren't very hard to teach, I must say. They had their reading books and I taught them. And the more I taught, the more I liked it! I really enjoyed it. These children were just so interested in hearing everything about everything, and I realized that they really wanted to learn. The only thing I dreaded was the thought of the annual visit of the County Superintendent, who came around to the schools once a year. Mr. Bock was the County Superintendent then, and he came in one day. I had the children do a reading lesson, and I guess he was quite pleased about it because he went over and told Miss Emma Wersler that I had the makings of a good teacher! When I was teaching at Salem that year my salary was $40 a month, for ten months. (My father was a School Director then too!) Later, when I was principal in addition to teaching, I got more than the other teachers. After that year I decided to go to school again. I went to Temple for two years and took the two-year course. Then I went to teach at the Walker School. Walker School was located on what was known as Parson Currie Road. (The road no longer exists; it ran from Yellow Springs Road past the school, and on to Swedesford Road.) Later on the school and grounds were sold and became a part of Echo Valley Farm. I can't quite remember whether I got the job as a teacher at the Walker School right after I graduated, or whether there was someone there who wasn't satisfactory and they asked me to come in take her place, but anyway I went there to teach and stayed there for three or four years. It was sort of strange, you know: I went to school there myself as a child, and it sure seemed strange to go back there to teach. The blackboards were just the same, the same desk was there that Miss Emma Wersler had used when she was teaching there. It was just like going home - but I never dreamed that I'd be doing a thing like this. Of course, I had all eight grades then. I taught all the different grades, though at times I didn't have all eight grades because there weren't that many pupils. The number of pupils varied. They come and go. Of course, many of these children's parents worked at Chesterbrook Farm or for Senator Knox, who lived down there near the covered bridge. The desks were graduated, and the first graders all sat up front. One of my little pupils was Elizabeth Kirkner Weaver. She was my first grade child, and she sat up front. [Libby Weaver: Do you remember about Carolyn Burgents' teaching me to read? She was probably in the fifth or sixth grade, and I was in first. A boy named Charlie Frank was also in about first or second grade. And you said, "Carolyn, I'd like you to teach either Elizabeth or Charlie to read. Well, she looked at Charlie's hands, and he had warts all over his hands, so she said, "I don't want to have anything to do with him", and so she taught me to read. And to this day she tells me that I am a good reader!] I was probably having classes with the older ones at that time. I had some eighth graders and seventh graders, and they were helping me teach the younger children. The first graders always got taught first in the morning. At the beginning of each school day, I read a passage from the Bible and we said the Lord's Prayer. We also sang a song, and saluted the Flag. The water for the school was brought by the boys from a nearby farm. I think Harry Kirk lived there at that time. They had a wonderful spring - it was running all the time -- and they'd go up there to get the water. As for the janitor, I didn't want to sweep that school room -- but I did! Then one of the boys offered to sweep the floor. He was paid; the township paid him and I think he got about a dollar or two a month, or something like that. Of course, I always stayed there until he was finished sweeping and cleaning out. During the very cold months, my father and I would walk over to the school on Sunday afternoon and put coal in the furnace so there would be heat on Monday morning. I also stoked the furnace Friday afternoons before going home. I remember I had one little boy come in from down by the Knox Bridge. I think his mother walked him up to school. He was very little, small for his age, a first grader. After a while they got to the point where he knew the way by himself -- and it's a long walk from Knox's Bridge up to Walker School. Anyway, one day he didn't come and didn't come. I said, "I guess he won't be coming today." (I can't remember his name.) Then one of the older boys looked out the window and said, "Oh, Miss Wilson, there he is, coming now up the road past Echo Valley Farm." But he still didn't come! I wondered what was wrong; it was going on eleven o'clock then. I thought I'd better send one of the boys out to see what's wrong and where he is. Then he finally came down the school lane and to the school, grinning from ear to ear -- and holding a bunch of wild flowers to me. I was ready to say something to him, to scold him a little bit -- but I couldn't say a word! I still think of him, walking up the road, stopping to pick a wild flower, and then he'd go along and find another one. Then I had a family that lived up on North Valley Hill. (I don't think the house is there anymore; it was where the Valley Forge Mountain homes are now.) They came to school -- they didn't attend very regularly, but they did come -- and every spring when the arbutus was blooming the girls would bring a lovely bunch of trailing arbutus. I told them, "Be sure when you pick that arbutus you don't pull the roots out; cut it off and bring it" -- which they did. So I got arbutus every spring. After the children finished at the Walker School, those that went to high school went up to Tredyffrin-Easttown. And they had to find their own way there in those days; there were no school buses to take them. We had a parent-teacher association which met every month. Mrs. Dewees was the president of it. We decided different things in these meetings. One time we decided to have a supper to raise some money. (At first I couldn't for the life of me think what we raised the money for, so then I called three or four former pupils, and none of them could remember what happened either, it was too far back. Then it dawned on me.) We bought a little two-burner coal/oil stove, so we could have hot soups for lunch once in a while if we wanted them. So we decided tc raise the money for it by having all the women, the children's mothers, bring in a supper. They were to be auctioned off, and the men were to buy them. Whoever bought your supper, you ate your supper with him. Some of the men from Chesterbrook Farm used to come -- they were just young men -- and they always came and bid because they knew they were going to get something good to eat. Since there was no water in the school, everybody had to bring everything. Different families -- several of them would do it -- would bring enough lemonade for everybody. It went off very well, and we raised enough money to buy the little coal oil two-burner stove. Another thing we decided to do was to have a spelling bee between Salem School and Walker School. We invited the Salem School to come down, and Miss Emma Wersler, who was the teacher, brought seven or eight of her pupils down. They were eighth graders and on down probably to the fourth grade; we didn't expect the little ones to learn to spell much. I was captain of my school, and Miss Emma was captain of Salem School. Mrs. Dewees, being the president, gave out the spelling words; as you missed you went down, had to sit down. It got to the point where nobody was left but Miss Emma Wersler for the Salem School and I. And fortunately for me -- I will admit it -- Mrs. Dewees gave her the word "misspell". I just sat there and thought, "Oh, how do you spell that? I'm not sure of it." And Miss Emma answered, "m-i-s-p-e-l-l". I knew right away it was wrong, so I said, "m-i-s-s-p-e-l-l" and Walker School won the prize! At the end of the year we always had a picnic. All the food, or course, had to be brought. We had lemonade and cake. I guess everybody brought their own tumblers too, to drink the lemonade. We did have some dishes, I know, some soup plates or small plates which we kept in the cupboard. There are so many things I can't remember: it was a good many years ago when I taught there -- about 1917, 1918, 1919 and 1920. And that's a few years back! When I left Walker's I came up to Paoli. Miss Geary then took my place at the Walker Schccl. TopStanley K. Landis I had experience with the one-room school both as a student and, later, as a supervisor. I attended one-room schools in Northampton County. I don't think they were quite as progressive as Chester County, because we had no P.T.A.s up there, and we had school for only eight months a year, not ten. We closed on the 30th of April. There were no snow days, though; the school was never closed on account of the weather. The teacher was a master at scheduling, I must admit. And she used the older children to teach the younger ones. It was an old technique that the one-room teachers used all the time, the older pupils helping the younger ones learn to read. The pupils were being prepared for the high school entrance examination. If you wanted to go to high school you had to take an examination, which was given by the County Superintendent. You took it in the eighth grade. However, if your teacher thought you were ready in the seventh grade, he or she could recommend you for the examination in the seventh grade. So we did have some progressive things happening in the schools, even in those days! I can remember that we memorized an awful lot. There were poems. We had a little writing book in which we wrote the poems, and also famous sayings. We read certain classics. And we were reviewed on them when the County Superintendent came around. (Incidentally, the first thing that our County Superintendent would always ask was, "Let me see your handkerchiefs." So the teacher had everybody keep a clean handkerchief in his or her desk -- for when the Superintendent came around! There were no Scott tissues or Kleenex in those days!) At the end of the year the teacher would permit the boys to chop the wood for the next year, so the boys who were in the seventh or eighth grades would bring an axe to school. Imagine kids that age with axes, bringing axes to school! They'd chop the wood and pile it up in the wood house for the next season. And the girls would clean the blackboards, count the erasers, shine the desks, and do anything that would be helpful for the following year. On the last day we had a big party. But before the party we had to scrub the school. We all scrubbed the building and got it really cleaned up -- and then we could have the big party, with ice cream and cake and things that were brought in by the youngsters. But I don't remember any parents coming. We all brought the food to the school ourselves.
Those are some of my experiences as a student. As a supervisor, I became Assistant County Superintendent in Chester County in 1950. We still had 67 school districts in Chester County then. (Today we have only twelve.) But there were 67 in 1950, and 20 of them, almost a third of them, still had one-room schools. (Not all of them were grades one through eight; some of them had been reorganized and were just primary schools.) But some of them had all eight grades. I was much younger then, and I thought I knew a lot about teaching, especially in the techniques of reading and writing. On my first tour that year I was down to a school in the Oxford area. The teacher had about 40 pupils in her school, all eight grades, and was teaching them all, even the first graders, cursive writing. I was upset by that; 1 thought the younger ones should be taught manuscript, because that's the way I was trained with. So I waited until recess time, and then I said something to her and mentioned to her that the cursive writing might not be appropriate for the first graders. She said, "Well, did you look at it?" She showed me some of their work -- and it was beautiful. So then I used my other argument: I said, "You know manuscript writing is very helpful in learning to read." So then she had them read for me -- and they could really read. So I learned a lesson very early in my supervisory days: that there's more than one way to do something, and it depends upon the enthusiasm of the teacher to make it work. The County Superintendent's office prepared and developed a lesson plan or suggested daily program for use in the one-room school. The school was divided into four groups -- the first and second grades, the third and fourth grades, the fifth and sixth grades, and the seventh and eighth grades -- and the day was broken down into 26 time periods of 15 or 20 minutes each. A schedule was then made up, showing what each group or division was to do during each time period. In one prepared for Chester County by Thomas Bock in 1913, for example, the school day started at 9:00 o'clock with the opening exercises, including a scripture reading, singing, and current events, for all the school. At 9:15, grades 1 and 2 were to recite in reading and numbers, while the other groups were preparing arithmetic. Then at 9:30, grades 3 and 4 would recite in arithmetic, at 9:45 grades 5 and 6 would recite, and at 10:00 the seventh and eighth grades would recite. Each group had its own schedule: at 11:15, for another example, grades 1 and 2 would be working on sentence building, grades 3 and 4 would be doing a reading exercise, grades 5 and 6 would be reciting on geography or on nature study, and the 7th and 8th grades would be engaged in library reading. One of the reasons for the proposed schedule was to insure equal attention was given to each group; there was sometimes a tendency for the teacher to give more time to the older pupils. Believe me, the teacher had a tremendous job to keep her pupils interested in their books or in whatever they were supposed to be doing when the others were reciting! This schedule had to be posted in the room. And if the teacher wasn't on that schedule when the Superintendent visited the school, he or she heard about it! We sometimes used to have School Board meetings in some of these one-room schools. I'll never forget one night in a school in Elk Township. It was so cold that we all had to sit around the heater, which was in the center of the room. Most of the schools had sort of a jacket around the stove, but this school didn't. I was staying close to the stove to get warm, and all of a sudden I began to smell smoke. The bottom part of my coat had caught fire! Things were a lot different in those days. We've made a lot of progress since then. But really, the teacher in the one-rocm school made a tremendous contribution to education, That's really how we got started in public education in Pennsylvania.
The Walker School [now a private residence], photograph + Angelo Cecco |
