A Pioneer School

        In pioneer days, as now, four things were essential to a good school. They were the material equipment, the parents, the children and the teacher.

       The idea was not by any means general that the girls needed an education and, rough and rugged as the people were, they thought that any place was good enough for a school house. Sometimes it was an abandoned building. It may have been an old corn crib. In one instance, at least, it was an old stable. Little attention was paid to heat, light or ventilation. If they did not burn or freeze that was sufficient. They were not comfortably seated and no attention was paid to beautifying the school room or surroundings. Even a heating stove was a rare thing. Usually it was a fire-place where a pupil would roast one side, while the other was freezing. An opening made by cutting a log out of one side served as a window and when it was too cold, the window was either closed up entirely or at best it was covered with greased paper. Glass for windows was so rare that mention was made of one as the first and only one in the State having "real glass windows."

       One of these schools which I think is a typical one, was held for many years in an old church house. It was a frame building much larger than the average, possibly about thirty by forty feet. It stood on pillars. There was no underpinning and the hogs which were allowed to run at large often bedded under it. The noise they made furnished great amusement to the boys and girls. The floor was so open that the wind could whistle thru it. If a pencil were dropped it was sure to roll thru a crack and if a finger of boy or girl went up, it meant that the individual wanted to go out, crawl under the floor and get the lost pencil.

       The seats were just long benches, sometimes arranged to face the fire-place or sometimes arranged in a square around the stove. The benches were often merely logs split open and pegs driven in the round side for legs. Four was the maximum number of desks they had, one for the large boys, one for the small boys and the same for the girls. They were, of course, homemade. A blackboard possibly a yard square, made of plank was all they had and, as they thought, all they needed. One box of crayon would last several years. Instead of crayon they sometimes used a kind of clay they called kale. If they had a map of the United States and another of the hemispheres they thought themselves well supplied along that line.

       Often the Bible was the only reader in school. They used the "Old Blue-Backed Speller'' written by Noah (Noah Webster). An advanced arithmetic was considered the most important of all.

       It was a source of great pride to a boy to go thru the arithmetic, for his education was then completed. The teacher could not "learn" him anything more and he could quit school. As we say now, he graduated. There was no library in school and there were but few books in the community. In fact well-graded text-books did not exist.

       The teacher taught them how to make pens of quills and ink of balls they got from small oak trees in the woods. He set the copy for them to write. Here is one of them, "Luck at the coppy careful." You see, he had not mastered the spelling book and that he did not know by any means all about grammar. Tho "all declared how much he knew," it is evident that his scholarship would not pass muster now. They used slates and homemade soapstone (talc) pencils. The teacher "boarded round," i.e., the people took it turn about in boarding him. They paid so much per pupil or "scholar" as they called it. A little later, the "deestrict" (district) school was organized by law and the teacher was paid partly out of public funds and finally all was paid that way.

       The children liked to chew the corners of their books and to throw spit balls. Occasionally they became unruly and it resulted in a "free-for-all" bout, or sometimes it was "a fair field and no favors" between the teacher and the bully of the school. If the teacher whipped all was well and he was respected from then on, but if the boy came out victorious he was a hero and the teacher left in disgrace. The boys often prided themselves on being able to take lots of punishment and saying that it never hurt. One of their favorite sports was "lap-jacket. " In this the boys would get the best switches they could, two would join left hands and whip each other with these switches. The one who flinched first was, of course, the loser and was laughed at by all the crowd. The victor must then go thru the same ordeal with some one else who was sure to challenge his championship.

       In one instance a "gum-wax" (sweet gum) tree stood about a quarter of a mile from the building and at noon many of the boys and girls, all of whom took their dinners, would rush to their baskets, grab their hands full of food and make a "bee line" for this tree, and they stood around it like "coon dogs" around a "coon tree". Each would pick away at the wax, putting each little particle into his mouth until he had a good "chaw" (chew). Then he would give up his place and go away to trade his wax out of his mouth to some one who was not fortunate enough to get to the tree. They were not altogether selfish. Sometimes the big boys would gather a good "chaw" and give it to the big girls, receiving in return a pleasant smile. At other times they would lend their wax. It was common to hear some little one begging:

"Let me chaw yer wax till recess."

"Boo! boo!" said a little fellow.

"What is the matter now?" said the teacher.

"I swallered my wax," said the little fellow.

"It won't hurt you," said the teacher.

"But I borrowed it from Bill and he'll lick me

at recess," said the little fellow.

       In the school room, then, good discipline did not always consist in keeping quiet, but sometimes it was in keeping noisy. To be sure they studied, the teacher required them to study aloud and if it became too quiet the teacher would say, "Spell out, spell out!" On Friday afternoons they often had spelling matches, where they chose sides and spelled down or it might be a "program," as they called it, which consisted of "saying pieces" gotten "by heart" from some old book. Sometimes on Friday nights they had a spelling match between different schools or possibly they had a debate in which the older people took great interest. All these things were important factors in the education of the people at that time.

       In the earlier days, the teacher was always a man and he had to be a man, physically, but conditions changed and many ladies were employed. Most of them had high ideals and their "boarding round" served a good purpose in educating the parents also and in securing interest in the school and community interests in general. The memory of the pioneer teacher was a sacred memory to the children of the pioneers. They served well their generation and did their part of the work toward the evolution of man as man shall be when time shall be no more. Waller

One Room Schoolhouse: Similarities and Differences. 

This is a school furnished and run by a wealthier 

community than the one described above.