Studying One Room-Schools
by Kathy Wendling

Kathy is the author of From One-Room School to Union High School: The History of Windsor Central Supervisory Union. We asked her to write an article about one-room schools for Community Works Journal. Kathy has the following suggestions for those interested in pursuing their own studies of one-room schools:

This article was written with citations mostly in my home area of Windsor County but you can pursue a similar project using many of the same sources that I did. Beers’ Atlases were created for each Vermont County during the mid-nineteenth century. Each town map shows school districts, the school houses in each along with the dwelling places of nearly everyone in town. From a map of your town, see if you can locate the actual school houses. Vermonters do not like to tear down a building if they can find another use for it. Often you will find the school house has become a private home. Look for the large, usually multi-paned windows and the basic shape of the original building. Verify your guesses by asking long-time residents in your area—or check with your town clerk.

When you conduct oral history interviews, be sure to enquire when the subject went to school and how many grades were in one room. Compare the things I found with your neighborhood by asking about school teachers, routines, types of classes and how they were taught. How did they get to school, and what sort of lunch hour did they have. The people whom I interviewed enjoyed talking about their childhood years—I think most people do. –Kathy Wendling

In the nineteenth century, Vermont was a state with a rural population spread fairly evenly among its hills and valleys; thus it is not surprising that the one-room school became the standard for local education. While town or city centers did have enough children to justify larger school buildings, the thinly populated hinterlands did not. A look at the Windsor County Beers Atlas (published in 1869) shows most of the county’s 24 towns were divided into many school districts. In addition to those districts solely within the town, there were usually at least one or two that were “shared” districts—these were districts located on the border of two adjoining towns. It was deemed that the children of both towns would be better served by ignoring political boundaries. This sharing was particularly easy to accomplish in the early days when it was the people living within the district’s borders who raised the money to support the school. Later problems of sharing the costs were a microcosm of things to come, when town school districts pooled their taxing ability to support union schools.

Many of the first one-room schools were truly that: a single room with little else to recommend it. Pomfret’s first school house in the 18th century did not even have windows! Iron stoves provided the heat, often enhanced by long runs of interior stove pipe—an arrangement that would make modern day safety engineers shudder. Lighting came from ever larger windows and kerosene lamps long before electricity. Eventually, in this century, indoor toilets replaced the outhouse of previous years. As time went on, a small addition might create a coat room, and perhaps even a place to eat the lunches brought by the children. The school building often became the area meeting house as well. Sometimes funerals were preached within its walls, or other neighborhood get togethers held therein.

The more multi-function the building became to the neighborhood, the more its loss was felt when shifting populations or educational trends caused a particular school to be closed. This sense of community depended largely on how the area’s adult residents had come to depend upon it. In Pomfret in 1990, the four scattered school buildings had become a logistical problem for those who planned school bus routes and for families of several children scattered among the schools. It can now be said that the current school provides a much greater sense of community than its many predecessors.

During the last century, the school year was divided differently. There were summer as well as winter sessions. Generally the boys attended during the winter when their work on the farms was much less demanding. Girls, for whom the trip to school could be especially arduous in winter, were more likely to attend during the summer term. Accordingly, men were more often teachers in the winter time when their brawn was needed to keep the “big boys” in order. An examination of the Pomfret school records in 1850 shows clearly that the men teachers were paid substantially more than their female counterparts: $10 to $18 a month for men and $4 to $8 for women teachers.

The lack of amenities seems to have been taken for granted. Going out to get water from a neighboring farm was considered by students a real pleasure—as good as recess. The water was generally consumed by all students from a common dipper. Lighting and heat were probably not much different at home on the farm. The older boys were expected to help the teacher take care of the wood stove. Janitorial duties fell to the teacher or, once again, the older students. Even the isolation of being alone in the country was not unlike the isolation of a hill farm. (School teachers in one-room schools in the twentieth century complained of this and were given telephones.) Often the earliest school teachers had had only a little schooling themselves. My grandfather in Warren, Vermont taught in such a school after only two years at Waterbury Academy. Actually, that was more education than was provided many other teachers of his time (1886). Hosea Doten of Pomfret tried to remedy this by offering a school for teachers in 1850. During the 1920s Woodstock High School offered a one-year post graduate course for teachers. It was the gradual recognition that teachers needed special training that lead to the creation of state “normal schools” where teachers were trained. (These schools ultimately became the present state colleges.)

The training and professionalization of teachers became a factor in the demise of the one-room school. Eva Gasper recalled her days in such a school in Reading, Vermont in 1909. She told how students in each class were called to sit at the front of the room in the “recitation seats.” These front benches had no desks; they may be seen in many interior school room photographs from that era. Thus, there were no walls between reciting children and studying ones. Those not “up front” could listen in or try to tune out the others. This arrangement certainly had pluses and minuses. It could offer a preview or a review for the non-reciting students; it could also prove a tremendous distraction. Today we tend to become very nostalgic in our recollection of the one-room school. The number of people who actually attended these schools is declining rapidly. In my hometown of Pomfret, a modernized version of such schools persisted until this decade. This version featured small school buildings in several locations around town, each housing one or two grades. The physical plant was indeed one (or one and one-half) rooms, but the practice of including all eight grades in one room had long since been abandoned. In fact, most such multi-class situations had disappeared by the end of World War II.

With the trend to more and more preparation before teacher certification came specialization. Teachers who could and would teach all eight grades at once had become nearly impossible to find. The true one-room school based on the early models, with children of many ages pursuing up to eight grade levels of study in a day, is now confined to a very few private schools. I have heard of such a private school in the Rutland area; it is a modern computer-equipped school that serves a church community, accepting children of all ages.

For the eighteenth century, the proximity of a school to its students was primary. Children either walked or commuted by wagon or on horseback. (In the winter time, according to Mrs. Gasper, they sometimes slid down hill in one direction or the other and trudged through the snow when going the other way, pulling their sleds. Eventually one-room schools got telephones, which helped relieve the sense of isolation. By the 1920s these schools were encouraged and then mandated to put in indoor plumbing. The state inspected each school and awarded a “Superior School” rating to those that provided such amenities, including some kind of play equipment (Those not granted such a rating were considered “Standard.”) If the teacher was organized, a disciplinarian, and highly capable, the learning experience worked well for the students. If, however, the opposite were the case, a student might find the learning process chaotic or nearly nonexistent. Some superintendents openly reported such cases without proposing solutions—so such a teacher might go on disrupting instead of encouraging education for several years. Imagine being caught in such a classroom!

Obviously the one-room school nostalgia felt by many is for the well-run classroom. In his youth in the 1920s, Bill Mounce remembered carving his initials on a potato and bringing it to the South Woodstock school to roast for lunch. This was fun, as he recalled it. The camaraderie of those days lingered for the rest of his life in his memories, which he readily shared until his death last year. I have found that school memories stick with each of us, and our own tendencies to be positive or negative govern how they are recalled. TV star Bill Cosby, when accepting an award recently, mentioned three or four grade school teachers who had greatly effected his life. I found this to be true in my interviews for my book, conducted a decade ago. School teachers, loved or despised (mostly the former) were the subject of many a memory.

A good school staffed by good teachers is the modern goal. Of course it was ever so, but being stuck for eight years with the same teacher when you could not establish a mutual rapport was the biggest drawback of the one-room school system. Actually, chances were good that the same teacher would not remain for eight years. The challenge of teaching students at so many levels was daunting. From the beginning, young women went into teaching as a way to earn a living until they met their future husband. Once a teacher married, school districts generally did not wish to keep her in their employ—even if she wanted to continue. This became pronounced in all Vermont schools of whatever size during the depression. At that time, the general policy was not to employ a married woman unless she was the sole support of her family. Remember, this was a time when money was short for every one and jobs were hard to find. It took World War II and “Rosie the Riveter” to change that situation. With the improvement of transportation after World War II, the improvement of roads, the coming of school buses, and the specialization of teacher training that now includes many fields not envisioned a century ago, the central town school became the norm. Since the 1950s, the high school level of education has been served by unions of several towns.

I have tried to make this a balanced report. Whether we yearn for the old days or praise the present school system, it seems apparent that we cannot go back. The one-room school served a need that is no longer there.