The Village and Community School

        The first settler, like the first man to eat an oyster, was a man of courage, and a gambler too; he took a chance. He cast aside the precedents of the Old Country to make a new way of life. His ancestors had lived in a tight groove. They were born into a class above which they could not rise; their social life was rigid, the routine of everyday living long since stabilized by custom and tradition. Now, a new man in a new world, he made his way from scratch; he had to be self sufficient, make his own decisions, write new laws for a new society. Liking his fellow man, he walked over the hill to visit the second settler and the two of them sang a song and traded labor at harvest time. Then others came, and crowded upon each other and they found they needed a set of laws, a police force, and a court. They needed, too, a place to trade, for self-sufficiency vanished with the coming of others. They brought in a man of God to interpret the Word, and built a temple. They had hopes their children would go beyond what they were, so they banded together and built a school.  

"Snap the Whip" game played by young students in front of a rural little red school house by
Winslow Homer. The Hurley schoolhouse still in use during the late 1870s in New York's
Hudson valley was the inspiration for one of two paintings created in 1872.

       These things grew into the crossroad village, with its church, its school, its blacksmith shop, and its trading post. The village became the big wheel that turned the smaller wheels of outlying farms. Like arteries feeding the limbs, roads threaded out from the village to the farms; over them their crops went to market, their children to school, and their families to church. And eventually telephone lines followed them, and the R.F.D., the free delivery of the daily mail. This was the village and the community, almost as self-sufficient and isolated as the settler's farm had once been. But this, too, passed with the twentieth century, when wheels and good roads knit the whole world of America into one community. 

• Read about different school desks from three eras here.
• Visit the Little Red Schoolhouse in Wickenburg, Arizona (video tour)
• Return to The Good Old Days