Little One-Room School Chapter 2

by Chester Belcher, Memories Of Shirley Speedy Shields

Memories of those two and one-half years I spent as a pupil at the Mifflin, Indiana, one-room school are sketchy, yet some memories remain of both school days and the setting.

 

The cool dew from the night seemed to slip into our open bedroom windows. Living in a valley we called a holler, this dew did not dry until afternoon. At night the sounds of locust and cicadas filled our ears from the surrounding woods with whippoorwills or owls, occasionally, making their calls. The family dog barked if a raccoon came near the late corn in the garden. We woke early and abruptly, for it was after Labor Day, which signaled the beginning of school (according to the calendar).

 

Once school began in September, we would attend until late October, then be off for Teachers Institute. Thanksgiving Thursday and Friday and Christmas week were days at home. Family gathered in while Mom baked in the oven of the wood cook stove. Presents were bought for Christmas. Children and adults memorized their parts for the church program. We would stand in line at English near the doctors office to receive a bag of treats: an orange, candy and peanuts.

 

The next holidays would be Groundhog Day, Lincoln’s Birthday, George Washington’s Birthday, but these would be celebrated at the school with the stories explaining their significance. The Parson Weem’s story about little George cutting down the cherry tree stressed how honest little George Washington must have been to tell the truth about his misdeed. Washington’s birthday was always a holiday on February 22.

 

On Valentines Day the students would exchange small cards with short notes on them. We never heard of Spring Break; however, students stayed home on Good Friday. School ended in early May.

 

In our community, May 31 was called Decoration Day, a day set-aside for families to take flowers to the cemetery. Adults visited family gravesites and gave the cemetery treasurer $2.00 to defray the cost of mowing. Children coming along with their parents were taught to be careful to walk at the foot of the graves. Respect for family and tradition was communicated to the new generation at these times.

 

The Crawford County Superintendent, who was guided by the state of Indiana, governed the school calendar and guidelines. The Union Trustee, who was an elected official, hired the teachers and paid their salary of $100.00 a month and provided supplies. These supplies - coal bucket, coal, water bucket, chalk, erasers and a pencil sharpener, as well as maps - were the same as when my mother Clara attended at the Mifflin one-room school.

 

I was the third generation to attend the Mifflin School. My mother Clara Smith, her mother Dessie (Denbo) Smith and her father James Roy Smith graduated from the Mifflin one-room school. James Roy Smith’s sisters, brothers and his son, Everett Smith, all graduated from eighth grade at the Mifflin One-Room school. They had walked to school, which was about mile.

 

In 1941 my mother finished the eighth grade. She then rode the school bus on a long meandering route through several communities with the destination being English High School. Upon graduating from English High School, Clara traveled by train to Dayton, Ohio, to live and work as a secretary at the Air Force Base. Dessie Denbo, my grandmother, attended from 1899 to 1908. My grandmother graduated at Mifflin; we do not know whether she could have made the trip to high school. Some have told us that it was typical to stay within a three-mile radius when roads were dirt roads. Many schoolteachers would board with a local family because it was difficult to travel quickly. Mifflin was fortunate enough to have teachers living within its community. A bus to English began a few years prior to 1929 but could not be financed after the depression began. Later the bus route was provided when finances became available.

In 1940-50 two of the one-room schools located within walking distance of the students closed. Lankford School, southeast of Mifflin, and Connor School, three miles west of Mifflin, closed. Since the one-room Mifflin School was no longer as close to the patrons homes, the superintendent and trustee accepted bids for an individual to use his own automobile to make multiple trips bringing children east, west and south to the school. Thus, Chester Benham picked up Judy Belcher, Darrel Benham, Larry Felker, Mary Ann Brown, Judy Kay Curl, and me who all lived east of the school. Chester also drove two other routes to bring children. These families included Hammonds, Smiths, Normans and my cousins, Linda, Michael and Marcia Smith. There were the Reddens, Forbes and perhaps others.

 

Amenities at Mifflin one-room school were similar to those in our own homes. We could back up to the fire in the wood stove in the living room and keep turning as one side was warmed while the other chilled. Our first Lincoln Logs were the kindling sticks my dad split for the cook stove. We constructed cabins using these kindling sticks.

 

Inside plumbing in many rural homes included only cold tap water. At school our water to fill the ceramic cooler was carried by buckets. Our clothes, whether homemade, ordered from catalogs or purchased at English, were washed in an electric washer with a wringer. This replaced the scrubbing on a washboard by my mother, which replaced boiling of laundry and using lye soap that my grandmother used. In winter the damp clothing froze dry on the clothesline. Outhouses and chamber pots were still in use in all three generations.

 

On winter nights water would freeze on the nightstand, since it was not common to warm bedrooms. We pulled back two, three, or four comforters and climbed into feather beds. We would say, I slept snug as a bug in a rug.

 

I do not recall considering the school rugged or rustic, since it was comparable to the way many rural people lived around Mifflin in 1955-57. Hearing the stories of Abraham Lincoln living in a cabin with only three walls, splitting rails and reading by oil lamps or the fire, we felt very modern.

 

We lived in a six-room home with wool rugs, pretty lace curtains and had a good-looking green enamel cook stove instead of an iron kettle in the fireplace. We had electricity instead of oil lamps. On our farm we had woven wire, chicken wire and barbed wire fences. How improved!We turned a tap instead of priming a pump with a cup of water or carrying it from the spring. A galvanized round tub would be rolled into the kitchen for bathing. A few families who could warm the additional room to keep pipes from freezing were adding bathrooms onto their homes. Like the Mifflin schoolhouse, our home rested upon large cornerstones with other stones supporting the center of each joist.

Like the changes in plumbing, our little community was in a time of transition. Our generation began changing from being self-reliant pioneers with strong community ties and began to open up to new commerce, modern techniques and improved methods, but with less of the previous community interdependence.

 

As cars and pickup trucks replaced horse-drawn wagons, road commissioners constructed new roads. The original roads often followed the creek bed, for the water actually helped the wooden wheels to swell and remain tight. Roads were moved to higher-level terrain with culverts and bridges sometimes added. The road was changed from near the creek in front of the Mifflin schoolhouse to a new route behind the building.

 

Gasoline at the Mifflin Store sold for $.29 for a gallon for many years in the 1950s.A loaf of bread cost 25-30 cents. My mother recalls her mother saying if bread ever went to 11 cents she would stop buying it. Farmers plowed with tractors rather than a team of mules or workhorses. Horses and mules remained on the farms, however, for some time. We five grandchildren, Linda, Mike, Marcia, Steven and I, would all ride at once on papaw Smith’s gentle mare workhorse.

 

Productive work was held in high esteem in our community. Farmers worked together in summer to plant and harvest crops. Neighbors shared their garden produce. Families canned fruit and vegetables by the hot-water bath method. My brother and I were to keep the fire burning steadily to constantly maintain a slow boil of the water covering the Mason Ball jars of green beans for three hours. Even though it was a hot July day we were glad to do it, for it was the only day of the year we were allowed to play in the fire.

 

In August, Mother and Aunt Louise traveled to Tower Orchard to purchase several bushels of peaches. We’d stir all afternoon with the special wooden paddle. After adding sacks of sugar and stirring, we poured the peach butter into Mason jars. These were stored in the cellar with all the canned vegetables and our potato crop. One neighbor had another use for these jars. He claimed the best place to keep his money was in the Mason and Clay Bank.

 

During the winter families would butcher hogs and hang the meat in the smokehouse after rubbing it with salt to cure. There was plenty of work for everyone: cutting and wrapping meat and grinding sausage. Rendering lard produced fresh cracklings as well as the lard.

 

The Mifflin Store, by 1955, began to give us new products like Oleo margarine. Years before I entered school, I had thought it fun to help with churning butter and to watch Mother form it in a wooden decorative press. Now we could buy margarine from the store, or we could buy a pound of homemade butter, which appeared like a beautiful rose having yellow petals for 50 cents from Cora Senn. Cora once told my brother and me if we would pick the cherries on her cherry tree that she would make us a cobbler. We did and were her guests for dinner and, of course, dessert was a delicious cherry cobbler.

 

Socializing occurred informally most often. The Mifflin Store and Post Office were places where people gathered or passed through daily. Since there were no telephones and the local newspaper was published only once a week, these informal meetings were important to community life. In 1957, the first transatlantic telephone cable was placed under the ocean, yet many rural communities like ours did not even have telephone lines. It was nearly a daily event for family or neighbors to drive down our lane with news for my parents, to borrow or return some item, or sometimes just to ask Dad what the work of the day would be. We had a natural Neighborhood Watch, for we expected to know everyone who passed by home. Relatives visited often and families would get together and make homemade ice cream.

 

Some school children, as well as several sawmill workers, came into the store at noon to buy a bologna sandwich and a 6-ounce soft drink (5 cents), candy (5 cents) and perhaps ice cream (5 cents). One afternoon after school several of us went to the store while we waited for Chester to take other children home. I watched people getting snacks, but I had no money. I chose a snack and asked Jessie Newton to start a tab for me as I had seen other people do. I learned my first and most memorable lesson in economics at supper that evening when I explained what Id done. You spend only what you have. I was sent the next day to pay my only credit payment and did not do that any more.

 

Families bought used books from their relatives and neighbors. A mother would talk with people after church or at Home Economics Club about the grade her child would be in next year until she found used books. The new workbooks and an occasional newly adopted book could be bought in English, nine miles away. One of the fondest memories of school years is recalling the pleasant smell of new books purchased at Bill and Phoebe Boss’s drug store.

 

In 1956, a drive to English was a once-a-week trip on gravel roads. The family might buy clothing, do banking, buy groceries and attend to any other business all in one day or evening. My parents would meet and exchange news with many people. In English there were recreational opportunities that had not existed in my grandmother’s time, during the first decade of 1900. There was a movie theater, and a roller rink that was opened in the 1950s.

 

In our homes, we also had new entertainment, the black and white television. Sometime following rural electrification (1939-1948), families bought radios that had tubes in them and could be plugged into newly installed wall outlets. Before TV time, my brother and I would listen to our grandfather and our dad discuss politics, and then our mother would read children’s stories to us. Children still spent much time after chores playing in the woods and at the swimming hole in the summer.

 

In winter they might jump into freezing water if another kid dared them to. During winter children enjoyed sliding on ice, sledding, building snow forts or snowmen. Frequently, they would hike to the many cliffs to see the curtain of icicles covering them. Children had time to discover nature and play.

 

On a farm, children were exposed to many authentic ways to be helpful. The value of work was formed by first-hand experience. Following these chores, homework assignments were required to be completed before play could begin. Homework was often whatever you were unable to finish in school; occasionally, students would have a special assignment to be done at home.

 

Some families gave their children kindergarten instruction at home, yet much of the first grade curriculum was what is taught in kindergarten today. Prior to studying the alphabet, students learned how to discern likeness and difference in patterns and colors. They learned how to follow directions. The idea of sequence was taught through the use of Mother Goose rhymes and picture books. Tracing exercises prepared students for writing. Five and six-year old’s were called to the recitation bench for the teacher to check how they were coming along saying their numbers to 100. One girl had lost her front teeth, and her counting was clear until she got to six. She called it kix. When she came to sixty, the numerals were pronounced kixty-one, kixty-two, kixty-three, kixty-four, kixty-five, kixty-kix, kixty-keven, kixty-eight, and kixty-nine.

 

Reading began with sight words and a small amount of phonics instruction in our reading workbooks. Before we entered school we had heard and imitated dialect. We would nearly always pronounce wash using an r in it. We did not say the ing at the end of words such as huntin, readin or ridin. You will hear many songs from those and earlier days with this dialect: A Huntin We Will Go and She’ll be Comin Round the Mountain. As small children we did not strive to change our speech habits. Therefore, we studied one way and used a different way to speak. Many educators wrestled with this issue as to whether our speech must be trained first or it would improve with our reading and writing instruction and proper practice.

 

Pupils practiced penmanship in writing manuals during primary years and on paper as they practiced cursive. While we used pencils for most of our work, writing time required a ballpoint pen when we left the primary grades. Our parents had also used ballpoint pens, pencils and mechanical pencils. Fountain pens were still popular with our parents. These had cartridges of ink, which were neater than fountain pens, that must be pumped full of ink. Our grandparents may have used the inkwells in our desks.

 

We learned history facts and the dates of their happenings. The American flag had only 48 stars. The 49th state, Alaska, was added in 1958. We studied health; however, we did not study science in grade school, except whatever interests in nature the teacher may have had. Then in October 1957, and again in November 1958, Russia sent a series of rockets into space called Sputnik. Very soon America felt compelled to teach students science at younger ages. By the time I was in eighth grade, a science textbook for young Americans was in the curriculum at the two-room school I attended at Grantsburg. Today science is taught in all grades. It must have worked, because we are leading in space exploration.

 

There was no instruction in music at our one-room school. Art was limited to cutting red and green paper to be pasted into a chain for decorating at Christmas time. Our teacher did not copy coloring pages or worksheets on a purple mimeograph machine, which became the latest school equipment in the late 1960s. The teacher did not have such technology as tape recorders, film projectors, record players, or

overhead projectors. Computers were just large adding machines that filled a room someplace far away. Personal computers were still just a figment of inventors imaginations at that time.

 

Having eight grades to plan for and all the papers for each class to be checked and recorded, our teacher instructed each students to use care to label their papers with the date, the subject, the page number and our name on our work. Arithmetic was a long word for the pupils in the primary age spell. I could not spell arithmetic, which was what our math was called in those days. Another student shared how he remembered the spelling: Say A Rat In The House Might Eat The Ice Cream. It worked, and later I learned it was a pneumonic device.

 

Something that brought out an interest for all of us in the room was the arithmetic competition at the blackboard. We would watch and listen with our complete attention. We saw which strategies were faster than other strategies. When adding a long column some would count the tips on the numbers; some would copy the sums and add those to the side. Hearing the older students borrowing and carrying helped generate a familiar sense about arithmetic that made learning easier in future years. We watched older students strive to master long division.

 

Another memorable activity was the weekly spelldowns each Friday afternoon just before the school day ended. The pupils lined up facing the teacher who pronounced the words. When a pupil misspelled a word, he returned to his seat, and the last one left standing was the winner. The goal of our class work was to bring each student to be able to successfully pass the eighth grade examination. The teacher had a great deal of material to cover, so management of students behavior was a significant issue.

 

Desks were attached to two boards that formed a row front to back. The seat of the desk was attached to the front of the persons desk in back of you. On the first day of school the teacher placed each pupil in a seat with a desk that best fit with his or her size. It was nice to receive one without many scratches. A desk without deep scratches would allow you to place your paper on it to write on a smooth surface. Carrying a pocketknife to school was typical in the 1950s. Children would also use a pen or pencil to press hard repeatedly to mar the wood.

 

If we copied, talked or whispered too much, the teacher would move us. We were not to pass notes to our neighbors. Some disciplinary tools used by our teacher were eye contact, loss of recess time, verbal reprimands, lowering our deportment grade and, very rarely, a whipping, to keep things under control.

 

Students raised hands to get permission to speak or ask the teacher questions. To visit the outhouse students raised their hand with two fingers extended. The teacher could simply ignore or nod approval to the student while continuing a lesson. It was necessary for the teacher to be able to instruct the class at the recitation bench while keeping an eye on the other seven grades.

 

Some of the teachers did not go out at recess, and some did watch the students during play. Most recesses we would choose up teams. Our teams would play ante over using the roof of the school building to pitch over a rubber ball. We enjoyed jail base, dodge ball, stoop tag or frozen tag. At the time Larry Bird was shooting hoops at French Lick, I don’t recall Mifflin school grounds being equipped with a basketball goal at all. Hoosier Hysteria had not arrived at Mifflin one-room elementary school in 1957, although many people followed the high school team. Children liked to play at the creek catching minnows or skipping rocks. In winter we would slide on ice-covered creeks or have a snowball fight from snow forts wed built.

 

We’d play a game called Fox and Hound where we’d use the snow to make the path resembling a circle for this game. In rainy weather students would remain inside for recess. One of the favorite games the girls played inside the school at recess was Upset the Fruit Basket in which one girl would whisper to each player a name of a fruit. This was played using two rows of seats. The leader would then go to the front of the aisle and name fruits. When the fruit name you had been given was called, you exchanged seats with someone else. If the leader simply said, Upset the fruit basket, all players exchanged seats.

 

There was no playground equipment on which to swing or climb. We gathered around a maple tree. Some of the students would hang off the lower limbs with younger ones poking around the roots with sticks. The older children would boast, spar and talk. The younger pupils listened to the middle school mentality of that day. Many of the older pupils went by nicknames such as Fish, Slick, and (a girl) Muffin.

 

We didn’t study any foreign languages in our classes; however, at recess older students would help the younger ones learn Pig Latin. For most words in pig Latin you place the first letter of a word at the end of the word and add ay. For example, ecretsay anguagelay for secret language. For short words like and, if and the, just add ay to the end of the word. If the first two letters of a word make one sound when spoken, switch both letters of the word to the end and add ay. The word when becomes enway, and this becomes isthay, and so on.

 

One of the poems we read in school was called, The House Beside the Road. The poem mused about what the house could tell of the happenings of its busy years, but now it had become just an empty and silent house beside the road. Although the schoolhouse is silent today, Mifflin one-room school served through three eras of very diverse cultures that saw two World Wars.

 

To Be Continued

The Author of this story, Chester Lee Belcher from Rockport, Indiana passed away in September of 2021.
We are very thankful that we were able to capture and preserve some of his memories and stories, before he passed away.

 

Published U.S. Legacies February 2006

© Copyright February 2006,

All Rights Reserved by American Legacies and the Chester L. Belcher family.