Little has molded the character of the early inhabitants of the upper Fishing Creek valley more than the country church and the one-room country school. This section is about one-room schoolhouses of our area, written preliminary to the discussion July 19, 2004, of one-room schools at the monthly meeting of the North Mountain Historical Society. The speaker will be Bob Webster, a favorite lecturer of the History Buffs. It all takes place at the Brass Pelican Restaurant, Elk Grove, on the third Monday of July about 8:30 AM.

The high standards that the public schools of Pennsylvania generally achieve today did not come easily. The groups that exist today that suggest that economy should outweigh achievement is nothing new.

We'll examine all aspects of the country school, starting with the early colonial schools. We'll work our way from that period through church schools and subscription schools and look at the more recent one-room schools of our area.

The first record of education we could find was in the year 1640, more than 40 years before William Penn obtained the charter for Pennsylvania. A ship called the Fredenberg sailed from Europe to establish the colony of New Sweden along the banks of the Delaware River. The Government of Sweden required that "patrons...shall be obliged to support at all times as many ministers and schoolmasters as the number of inhabitants shall seem to require."

Evert Pietesen was a Hollander in 1656 in New Amstel who "passed a good examination before the Classics," was a Schoolmaster and ziekentrooster [comforter of the sick], and was required to "read God's Word and to lead the singing upon the arrival of a clergyman." Other schoolmasters traveled from house to house teaching the children.

The Second Frame of Government required that residents be able to "read the Scriptures; and to write by the time they attain to twelve years of age." William Penn's educational dictates found little support, however. The provincial charter of 1701 didn't mention education.

Religious organizations generally provided the education in Colonial Pennsylvania. In 1715 the General Assembly authorized religious groups to conduct school and for the first 100 years of Pennsylvania's history virtually all schools were operated by religious groups in an effort to perpetuate the language, customs and faith of their ancestors. The standard belief was that education beyond reading the Scriptures or learning the exchange of money or writing a simple letter would led to "worldliness." The Pennsylvania Germans believed that a knowledge of the Bible and the soil would be a suffieient education. The thinking was that arithmetic should be taught consistent with what was necessary for a "Plantage Mann" [farm manager]. Religious doctrine, they felt, should be the curriculum. The Pennsylvania Germans opposed schools under government jurisdiction and illiteracy in Pennsylvania was rampant.

A farmer from Lancaster put in his will in 1748 that his widow was to "keep my two sons, Andrew and Joseph, and put them to School during her Widdowhood or till they can Read the Bible plain, and Read and Write Bills and Bonds, and Work the Golden Rule in Arithmatick Perfect. My daughters must learn to Read the Bible plain and to knit and make theer own stockins."

William Penn was responsible for Pennsylvania's first "public school" dating to 1689. The school was called the Friends' Public School of Philadelphia. In 1711, it became known as the William Penn Charter School and is now the oldest Quaker School in the world. It is today a college-preparatory day school educating boys and girls from kindergarten through 12th grade on a 44-acre campus in the East Falls section of Philadelphia. Quakers often created schools at their meeting houses with poor children charged little or nothing.

Christ Church in Philadelphia was established in 1695 by Episcopalians as a church school. The Baptists built their first church in 1684. The first Roman Catholic church in Pennsylvania, St. Joseph, Philadelphia, was established in 1730. While Lutheran, Moravian and Reformed churches supported advanced education, schools in German communities were conducted in German and were not considered progressive. The parishioners normally did not speak English. Benjamin Franklin expressed his concern once that German rather than English could become the official language of the state.

Early Scotch-Irish settlers had a "school founded and a schoolmaster appointed in every parish" and began to build churches and church schools as soon they arrived in the state with reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic and religion emphasized. The Presbyterian church established a "classical academy" in Bucks County in 1726, popularly called "The Log College." Graduates of The Log College filled vacancies in the growing number of Presbyterian congregations in the Middle Colonies and in the South and founded schools on the frontier modeled on their Alma Mater.

In the rural and remote sections of the state, there were few church schools. Private homes filled the need and mothers of the family acted as teacher and the children of the family and children of neighbors became the students. Payment for the teaching was "in kind," perhaps produce from the farm or meat from a slaughtered hog. School books were reused and handed down from generation to generation.

The 1887 History of Columbia and Montour Counties gives great credit to local secular teachers who taught in subscription forms of school in rural communities. A teacher would be employed for five months or so to impart the "rules of spelling, writing and arithmetic." Often payment was in merchandise such as local buckwheat or corn, and in cash. Trustees made sure that the building designated for the instruction was kept in good order. Tuition in the area of $1.00 or $1.25 per pupil for a three-months term was common--and so was it common that the teacher did not get paid and left in mid-term. These classes were often ill equipped and the instruction inferior to the church schools.

In 1854, Pennsylvania cut off state aid to German schools and passed a law that allowed removing school boards that didn't maintain free school systems. It took until 1873, however, before the State could say that "the door of a public schoolhouse stands open to receive every child of proper age within the limits of the state."

In 1873, the State constitution dictated that "No money raised for the public schools of the Commonwealth shall be appropriated to or used for the support of any sectarian school." Although a few German schools taught in German until about 1890, the State didn't train any of the teachers for these schools, and slowly all teaching in the state came around to English.

In 1851, the minimum school term was set as four months and the term increased to six months in 1887. County Superintendents of Schools were authorized in 1854. The Normal School Act of 1857 established regional teacher training institutions throughout the Commonwealth, starting with Millersville Normal, followed by West Chester and Bloomsburg. The Normal School Building was erected in Bloomsburg in 1869. Normal Schools were private but received some State aid. The School Code of 1911 allowed the state to purchase all the normal schools.

The State constitution of 1873 stipulated that all children in the Commonwealth above the age of six may be educated in the public schools and required that at least $1,000,000 a year be appropriated for that purpose. In 1893 a law was enacted required free textbooks. An act of 1895 authorized township high schools and provided for State aid.

During 1893, it became obligatory for school attendance between the ages of eight and thirteen. An act of 1897 authorized school directors to provide transportation for rural pupils. The first minimum-salary law was passed in 1903 setting the amount as $35 a month. The minimum school term was extended to eight months in 1921.

A graduate of a New York one-room school once wrote that a school was "an ugly box of a building with just the ghost of an ancient coat of paint remaining. The only evidence of beauty anywhere near is a couple of maple trees. The toilet facilities are in outhouses with unscreened doors-—one for boys and one for girls—-side by side."

William Heacock, writing about the school house on Market Street in Benton about 1848, wrote about going to the water pail and drinking from a common dipper that all the school used. Water not drunk was returned to the pail. No such thing as germs or microbes were even thought of in those days. According to Heacock's account, at times there were as many as 80 pupils in the school room and only one teacher to grades running from the A, B, C, class to the Fifth and Sixth Readers. The teacher in such a public school had his hands full.

Before 1900, the rural district schools were mostly ungraded; the teacher had thirty or more classes a day of five to ten minutes each, ranging from the alphabet to the equivalent of the eighth grade. The youth who desired an education beyond the sixth reader (approximately the eighth grade) could get it only by attending an academy, and that happened rather rarely.

According to statistics provided by the state, in 1915 there were 10,606 one-room one-teacher rural schools in Pennsylvania. More than half of these were closed by consolidation or by abandonment between 1920 and 1940, because of declining rural population. In 1935, a state law held that schools having fewer than ten pupils must be closed.

	Picture courtesy of Sue Lucas, Clinton, NJ
	Fairmount School, taken about 1936
	Row 1. John Spencer, Richard Harrison ( uncle of Sue Lucas), Ruth Spencer, Patricia Harrison (mother of Sue Lucas), Margaret Derkach, Robert Long, Nola Spencer, Paul Spencer, Danny Karlunas.
	Row 2. Iva Spencer, Jackie Harrison ( aunt of Sue Lucas), Leonard Sadusky, Mickey Derkach, Joe Derkach.
	Row 3. Ami Harrison ( teacher ), Buddy Karlunas, Martha Gearhart, Mary Karlunas, Charlie Long.

In 1885, there were seven school houses in Sugarloaf Township. For children living along Raven Creek, four one-room school houses provided the education until they were closed and students taken to Benton Area Schools.
* The Moore School was on the original Moore tract, located on the St. Gabriel-Fairmount Springs road, near Five Points. It closed in 1926.
* The Dodson School was near Dotyville. Coming from route 239, past Dotyville, on the left after you start down the hill on Schoolhouse Road, near a curve in the road foundations can still be seen in the woods about 30 feet off the road.
* The Davis School was on the present Shannon Mill Road, approximately where Blain Long now has his mobile home.
* The Pine Grove School was along the Lower Raven Creek Road in a grove of pine trees. The school house was built in 1875. The pine trees stood on the area of the schoolyard where the playground was.

Today there is a solitary maple tree planted on the lawn of the Pine Grove school. It was closed when the Benton jointure was formed in the late 1970s. One of the graduates of this school was Russell Shultz, a recipient in 2003 of the Hall of Fame Award at Benton Area School System, for his work with Ritz crackers and Lorna Doone cookies. Photo courtesy of Pam Tucker

* The Ash School preceded the Pine Grove school on top of the hill about a mile east of Benton.

We drove the ten miles to Jordan Township, once known as Muncy Creek township, on the Eastern end of Lycoming County Saturday to visit the Richart Grove School on the occasion of their annual reunion.

The Richart's Grove School

Jordan is a township that appears to have been divided up by present-day politicians, since Columbia and Sullivan jut into that portion of the township on an angle and surround Jordon Township on the north, east, and south. We first visited the well-preserved school house when Edgar Baker showed us where he was born, adjacent to the church and the school. That farm for the last 40 years has been known as the Kessler Farm, named for the family that purchased the farm from the Bakers.

The first permanent settler in what is now Jordan township is said to have been William Lore, who came to what was then wilderness as early as 1812. He built a home, raised a family and his descendants still live in the township.

Before 1900, there was a grist mill in the township, owned by Marshall Stout. There were three steam saw mills, owned by men with names like Bodine, Warn, Stackhouse and Johnson. Four water power mills were run by men by the name of Robbins, Minmer and Gordner. These are all names we recognize today as residents of the area.

Jordan Township only has one village: Unityville. The village once had a Temperance House, two stores and a gristmill. It had a post office, established in 1854. Unityville also had a I.O.O.F. lodge and an I.O.O.F. encampment.

According to a member of the reunion committee, Van Hall, the township had 8 or 9 school houses early in its history including Salem, Derrick, Richie, Biggert's, Lore, Prairie, Peterman and Richart.

The Reichart's Grove School can be traced back to the early 1850s; its first teacher was a man by the name of Press Yorks. The church and the school operated from the same building until 1893, when the adjacent church was built. The school continued in operation. William Richart, then 19, taught at what is now known as the Richart's Grove School starting in 1859. There were 12 students, some of whom were actually older than the teacher. The school closed in 1962, but the third Saturday of each July it comes alive again with former students.

When we visited the school yesterday, former students showed us where first and second grades were, and showed us two rows over when eighth and ninth grades were, only one seat apart.

Van Hall sat down at the teacher's desk and we snapped his picture beside the large American flag and the well-used blackboard.

It was a journey back in time and an enjoyable way to spend a Saturday afternoon with about 50 other people who love one-room schools. The school reunion for next year will take place July 16, 2005, by the way.

We were looking at the Benton Argus of September 10, 1964, and although we don't have any photographs to show you, the Benton Dam was completely devoid of water. According to the picture, a person could have walked across the inside of the dam from end to end without getting a drop of water on his feet. We suspect that September of this year will be a little different.

To be continued...