The One-Room Schoolhouse

by Elisabeth Deffner

One-room schoolhouses dot the countryside, but those still standing represent only a fraction of those in which generations of Americans received their early education. Well into the 20th century, as new settlements sprang up in the United States, establishing a schoolhouse was a sign of settlers’ optimism for and commitment to the future. A schoolhouse represented their determination to build a home, a permanent community, and to prepare the next generation for whatever it might face.

As those towns and villages thrived or declined, the schoolhouse either was outgrown or made unnecessary by a dwindling population. Whatever a town’s individual case, the school’s destruction—whether immediate or following long years of disrepair and decay—was too often the result. Today, protecting historic schoolhouses from destruction can be a daunting task, requiring extensive fund-raising and maintaining security for these little buildings, so often at the mercy of vandals in isolated areas. Across the country, civic groups seek financial and volunteer assistance in preserving these icons of their community’s history—even when that history is far from idyllic.

A one-room schoolhouse of today

When Robert and Richard Carlson, 42, started attending Angle Inlet School, a kerosene stove warmed students from the back of its single room. Most walked to the Minnesota school—which is separated from the rest of the contiguous United States by Lake of the Woods and a piece of Manitoba, Canada—and if they brought their guns so they could hunt on the way home, they just left them in a corner of the classroom during the day.

Much has changed in the nearly 30 years since the Carlson twins, the youngest of eight siblings, graduated from Angle Inlet School. It has no kerosene stove now, but lots of computers. Students aren’t allowed to bring guns, and most don’t walk to school: They boat from inlet islands, drive all-terrain vehicles, or take a winter ride on a snowmobile.

Even the schoolhouse is different. Angle Inlet School is now a mile or so east of where the Carlson kids learned the three Rs, and the weathered schoolhouse they remember was razed after the new one was built in 1983.

When Linda Kastl was hired to teach at Angle Inlet in 1985, she found a thoroughly modern structure, complete with refrigerator and microwave. But appearances deceive: inside this contemporary building is an old-fashioned, one-room school. It’s the last one-room public school in Minnesota.

“A lot of things we probably don’t have like a big school would,” Kastl says, “but there are some things we have here: the closeness and the one-on-one.”

If Angle Inlet sounds like a step back in time, there’s a good reason for that: one-room schools are an endangered species. In fact, Angle Inlet was closed from fall 1992 through spring 1994; only residents’ persistent efforts opened state legislators’ eyes to the reality of their situation—such as most students’ 90-minute drive across wilderness to the nearest elementary school. So Angle Inlet School was reopened.

Saving the schoolhouse

Idyllic they may be, but the charm of one-room schoolhouses can’t always save them from being closed, despite local efforts.

The end of a schoolhouse’s career as a school does not, however, have to mean demolition of the historic structure. The vast majority of schoolhouses still standing are used in a spectrum of other ways: as community centers and theaters, as museums and libraries, as churches and offices, and even—added onto and remodeled—as private homes and inns.

In 1972, Findlay, Ohio’s Hancock Historical Museum was given a former Marion Township Schoolhouse by the Wisely family, on whose farm it sat, and for whose farm it acted as a granary for almost 40 years after it and five other rural schools in the township closed their doors. The Hancock County Retired Teachers Association took on the task of restoring the brick schoolhouse, a mammoth undertaking that wrapped up in a year. “They were really into it,” museum director Sue Tucker says. “They had a mission.”

Now tourists and history buffs can visit the schoolhouse, and third-graders from across the county come to experience a traditional one-room school day. Boys don suspenders, and girls disguise their jeans with aprons. They enter the schoolhouse through separate doors, and take their seats facing portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln behind the teacher’s desk, which stands near the pot-bellied stove. Built in 1882, this school has seen generations of children writing in copybooks and practicing elocution, battling it out in spell-downs and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

The township’s other five schoolhouses were not so lucky. Four of them were destroyed by fire, demolition, or slow disintegration. (One other Marion Township schoolhouse has been used as the site of autumn pumpkin sales.) Those still in existence elsewhere in Hancock County get plenty of attention, though. Curator-archivist Paulette Weiser has put together a slide show documenting each one, from those that, like the museum’s little red schoolhouse, have been lovingly restored, to one now being used to store farm machinery—and all those in between. Weiser estimates that nearly two-thirds of the county’s 200 schoolhouses remain standing. “I really was surprised at how many of them were out there,” she says.

A bonding of students

Whether a schoolhouse is still a school, has been modified to serve another purpose, or has vanished, it still can bond a community together. Mooreheadville, Pa., is a case in point. Allie Eckert’s seventh- and eighth-grade years were spent in one-room Mooreheadville School on the outskirts of Erie. After those two years, her family migrated to California, where she graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1943. In August, she attended the 60th reunion of the class of ’43—not in Los Angeles, but in Pennsylvania—with her former Mooreheadville classmates.

Memories of that school, which burned down more than 40 years ago, tie them together. Eckert speaks of it glowingly—although she didn’t have it easy when she first enrolled. Her family had just returned to Pennsylvania after her father unsuccessfully had tried to find a job in California, so the other students saw her as a “city girl.”

“I had to prove myself,” she says with a chuckle. One of the most daunting tests was when she reached into her desk and found a dead rat among her books. Thanks to a discreet warning from the teacher—who evidently understood that Eckert would have to earn the other students’ acceptance—and her own quick thinking, Eckert managed to laugh it off and prove to the others that she was no city slicker, but a country kid like the rest of them. Soon enough she learned the rules of Kick the Can and Annie Over, and became one of the gang.

Now a resident of southern California, Eckert is a docent at Heritage Hill Historic Park’s Old El Toro Schoolhouse in Lake Forest, a white wooden schoolhouse that, despite the great difference in appearances, reminds her of the two golden years she spent in the brick Mooreheadville School, sturdy and elegant with pillars along the porch.

“To me, (schoolhouses are) the past, the history of the area you’re living in,” she says. “It brings it to life for you.

“It’s just a part of the past that I hope won’t be forgotten.”

Freelance writer Elisabeth Deffner works from her home in California.

first appeared: 10/26/2003