It is 1892. Indiana's Benjamin Harrison sits in the White House as President of the United States, Danville's own Ira Chase is the Indiana governor and Miss Phoebe presides over classes at the Pittsboro One Room School as its schoolmarm.
Miss Phoebe, played by retired Hendricks County educator Doris Martin, is one of five trained schoolmarms helping grade-school classes and community groups recreate a typical late-nineteenth-century school day at the lovingly restored one-room school house behind present-day Pittsboro Elementary School about 20 miles west of Indianapolis. The schoolmarms include Martin, Nancy Hughes, Darla Franklin, Martha Hughes and Lois Hoffman.
“As a retired elementary school teacher of 32 years, I love being a schoolmarm because, first of all, it keeps me with the children and adults, but I no longer have to grade papers,” said Martin in a recent email to me. “Secondly, l also love the history that we teach each day.”
The little one-room school house is most often full of eager scholars for spring and fall school field trips, but the school is available year round for groups to schedule a visit. We were lucky enough to get a private tour of this vintage school one day late last fall with Martin who lives near the school.
The little building started life in 1883 as a frame building known as the Caledonia School. It later became the Pittsboro One-Room School #3. Teachers held classes there for students from first through eighth grade until 1920.
The school then sat in a lonely cornfield, abandoned and deteriorating, for nearly 80 years.
It saw use as a place for a local farmer to store his grain, and he passed it down through several generations of his family. The building was in bad shape in the 1990s when then-owners Frank and Dorothy McClung tried to find new owners for the little building that would appreciate its history as a school.
The cost of moving the school discouraged some buyers, but the North West Hendricks School Corporation finally purchased the building for $1 from the McClungs and community leaders formed the One Room School Committee to raise money to move the school to a new site and to repair, renovate and restore the building.
The group raised $50,000 to move the school nearly 5 miles to the elementary school campus in 1997. The group obtained a grant for $100,000 and volunteers set to work, helping to complete the building's restoration in 2000.
One Room School Board member Judy Pingel continues to oversee furnishing the building with historically appropriate desks, maps, photos of former students and accessories like a school bell and books once belonging to Ruth Case, the teacher at the Pittsboro One Room School in 1911-12.
Since the school's opening as a living history site in 2000, over 22,000 scholars have signed on to play the roles of students studying their McGuffey readers, the standard text book for most students of the late nineteenth century, and studying classic subjects like reading, writing, arithmetic, penmanship, geography, elocution (public speaking), physiology (natural science), local Hendricks County history and orthography (spelling).
Martin showed us some late-nineteenth-century final exams for eighth graders, which were surprisingly difficult. I wondered real-life 1892 teachers would make of the skills of modern-day students, especially in subjects like penmanship now that many schools are debating whether to teach cursive writing at all these days!
“We are finding that many classes who visit the One Room School can no longer read the cursive writing that we have on our boards,” said Martin when I asked her that question.
Martin also noted that many visitors are surprised to learn that the student body at the school in 1892 might include young men as old as 20 still trying to complete eighth grade because they could only attend school a few weeks each year when they didn’t have to work on the farm. The schoolmarms of that era might be a few years younger than their oldest students.
The Pittsboro program for children typically meets the State Social Studies Standards for grades 3 and 4, so many of the program participants are third- and fourth-graders.
Students get nametags and assume the identity of children who actually attended the school in 1911, so they answer to the names of those students for the day.
The children arrive at school in the morning for a full school day that includes morning exercises like saying the Pledge, answering roll call and learning the school rules.
The students break for lunch and recess featuring typical schoolyard games from 1892such as tag-and-chase games like Drop the Handkerchief or Fox and Geese.
One-room schoolmarms like "Miss Phoebe" are also role-playing, so they don't recognize references to, or answer questions about, events that happened after 1892.
Students are encouraged to help enhance their living history experience by wearing period-appropriate clothing and bringing a box lunch prepared as it might have been in 1892 (with no plastic water bottles, cans, aluminum foil or plastic wrap).
Need a cup for water? The schoolmarm will show you how to make your own cup from a sheet of paper!
The school has a supply of plain muslin shirts for the boys and pinafores for the girls that they can wear over their clothes.
Martin told us that the children especially like learning about the future of the students they play at the end of the day. Meanwhile, some adults who participate in the program enjoy it because they have their own fond memories of going to a one-room school as children.
“We get their stories that sometimes we can incorporate into our program,” said Martin of those former students of one-room schools.
Visit the Pittsboro One Room School site for more information or contact Martin via email at [email protected] for information about scheduling a visit to the school.
Thanks to the Hendricks County Convention and Visitors Bureau for sponsoring my visit to Hendricks County, providing lodging, meals and a tour of Hendricks County attractions for my review during my recent visit there, with no further compensation. I was free to express my own opinions about the stay and experiences, and the opinions expressed here are mine.
© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved
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