Feature: One-Room Schools

One-Room Schools

The Backbone of American Education

by Debbie Neece, Bartlesville Area History Museum

Living off the profits of the land and teaching children the manner in which to better produce for the family was a necessity in the late 1800s; therefore, early education was a haphazard affair until the development of one-room schools. Peppering the landscape of Washington County, approximately 75 one-room schools offered early education for kindergarten through eighth-grade graduation, serving scholars as young as four years of age and as old as needed to graduate.

Obtaining an eighth-grade education in the late 1800s and early 1900s could prove challenging. Schools were conducted as private enterprises when a teacher and a gathering space were available. Often the space was a home, church, building supplied by a family or merchant, or under the trees along the Caney River.

School Masters and Marms were sometimes just slightly older than the students they taught and possessed a greater knowledge of elementary education than the students but rarely a college education. The classroom rarely had sufficient educational materials for the entire class; most students shared slate writing boards, chalk pencils, and textbooks. School classes were held seasonally when crop demands freed the children and between heavy rains and winter weather events that hampered travel to the school. Tuition was generally fifty cents to a dollar per student which could be reduced by in-kind payments of food or lodging; however, the Cherokee government paid the tuition for Indian children.

Beyond reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, U.S. history, and orthography instruction, education offered an opportunity for socialization through holiday programs and box suppers or pie socials which often doubled as fundraising opportunities. Young ladies poured their hearts into creating attractively deco-

GARFIELD SCHOOL CLASSROOM

rated boxed meals to be auctioned to the highest bidder. Then, just before the auction began, word would leak to her “smitten fellow” which box he should bid upon so they could share the picnic together under the school grounds tree.

Teachers served under a mandatory “Code of Conduct” and expected no less from their scholars. Manners were taught and strictly practiced. The motto “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was also practiced. Students displaying unwanted behavior resulted in punishment as light as wearing a shameful dunce hat in front of the class or as drastic as corporal punishment which made a deep impression on the minds of all students.

Passing an eighth-grade exam was “no walk in the park.” In the testing span of five hours, the students were required to complete:

Grammar (1 hour):

• Give the nine rules for the use of capital letters. • Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications. • Define verse, stanza and paragraph. • What are the principal parts of a verb? • Give principal parts of do, lie, lay and run. • Define case. Illustrate each case. • What is punctuation? Give the principal marks of punctuation.

• Write a composition of about 150 words and show there in that you understand the practical use of grammar.

Arithmetic (1½ hour):

• Name and define the rules of arithmetic. A wagon box is 2ft. deep, 10ft. long and 3ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold? • If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 pounds, what is it worth at 50 cents per bushel, deducting 1,050 pounds for the tare? • District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals? • Find the cost of 6,720 pounds of coal at $6.00 per ton. • And five additional difficult questions.

U.S. History (45 minutes):

• Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided. • Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus. • Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War. • Show the territorial growth of the United States. • Tell what you can of the state of Oklahoma. And more…

Orthography (1½ hour):

• What is meant by the following: Alphabet, Phonetic, Orthography, Etymology, Syllabication? • What are elementary sounds? How are they classified? • What are the following and give examples of each: Trigraph,

Subvocals, Diphthong, Cognate, Linguals?

• Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd and more.

One-room schools often had a dictionary onsite but students were not allowed access to the reference book during testing. Could you have passed this exam without Google or a calculator? After completing their eighth-grade education, some students were sent to boarding schools for further education while others returned to the family farm.

In the area that became Washington County, one of the earliest documented subscription schools was established at Silver Lake, south of Bartlesville. When the Osage tribe settled at Silver Lake, they built a walnut building which was sold to the Delaware tribe when the Osage vacated to establish Pawhuska in Osage County. In 1871, the Silver Lake Delaware School opened with thirty-seven students in attendance. Often buildings served the church congregation each weekend and the educational needs of children during the week. Such was the Silver Lake Baptist Church building where Miss Irby taught both Indian and children of pioneer families.

Nelson Franklin Carr established a subscription school about 1874 near his home at the Black Dog Ford, southeast of the current Oak Park addition. Coffeyville maiden, Mellie Smith was hired to teach the Carr children and about fifteen neighboring children. Miss Smith resided with the Carr family as part of her salary until she married John Seidle in 1880. Her parents settled near Cherokee Freedman Sam Beck’s place, at the end of Young Avenue, off Tuxedo Blvd., and her mother taught at a subscription school

This is a brief history of Washington County one-room schools. If you want to know more, the Bartlesville Area History Museum staff has compiled a book, Over a Century of Schools in Washington County: Gone But Not Forgotten.

MIDWAY SCHOOL

attended by the Whiteturkey and Beck children and Joe Bartles, son of Bartlesville and Dewey founder, Jacob Bartles.

Schools were unpainted or white-washed slab-sided wood, stone, brick, or even earthen sod construction and school locations were often noted by Section, Township, and Range, donning names of the property owner or geographical location. The experience was primitive by today’s comparison … water was carried from a nearby well and students shared the tin cup drinking vessel, a wood-burning pot-belly stove heated the space, students walked or rode horses to school and tied their animal to trees while awaiting the return trip, and the necessary room was an outhouse.

Some early schools left no records of attendance or names of teachers. Their existence has only been noted through memories, family histories, and obituaries. Such is “Uncle John Young’s School,” a log school on a one-acre plot of land near Copan. The school was surrounded by a wooden fence and old-timers said when class was in session, the school was encircled by “hitched” horses. This school was also recognized as the Caney Forks School due to the nearby confluence of the Little and Big Caney Rivers. When the log structure became unsound, it was replaced by a structure moved from California Creek and continued to serve the children of the area until about 1930 when the school was annexed into the Copan School district.

Several of the schools had more than one name. Occasionally, an accident with the wood-burning stove or lantern used as lighting burned a school building to the ground due to a lack of firefighting tools. After being rebuilt, the schools were often assigned a different name. In addition, some schools were consolidated or annexed to other districts which prompted a newly assigned name. For example, Cole School, in the Hogshooter

POST OAK SCHOOL

area, became Midway School, which was consolidated with Hillsdale School to become Middale. In 1950, Limestone School was annexed to Middale, retained the Limestone name, and the Midway/Middale School building was moved to the Limestone grounds and used as a kindergarten. How confusing is that?

Bivins School was an early subscription school southeast of Ramona, I.T. and located on Louis Allen Bivins’ homestead. Approximately twenty-eight students attended including three Bivins children. In 1912, a new building was built and known as East Side; and, in 1917, the Ramona School District became consolidated.

In 1907, along Stick Creek, east of Ramona, was a settlement of Cherokee Freedmen families with about twenty children and the Cherokee government sent Fanny Taylor to teach the children in a small church building. When the building was deemed unsanitary, the county built the Daniels School on an acre of allotment land donated by Frank Daniels. In 1922, the Daniels School was annexed into Oglesby and the school closed when the Freedmen children were integrated. Another “separate school” was the Martin-North Separate School which was established in 1911, southwest of Oglesby. By 1919, attendance began to wane and, in 1921, the school was annexed to Ramona.

Shortly after Jake and Nannie Bartles founded the town of Dewey, they established a one-room frame school building. In 1900, the first teacher at the Dewey subscription school was Miss Vi Duminiel, who was paid one dollar per month per student.

BLUE MOUND SCHOOL

Susie Keefer received her education at the Silver Lake Delaware School and attended the Northeastern Teacher’s College at Tahlequah. She then returned to teach at the Silver Lake subscription school and Rice Creek School before marrying Walter Allen in 1897. The couple moved to Dewey in 1901 to teach at the large “open concept” Dewey one-room school, which was equally divided with Walter teaching the older children on one side of the school, while Susie taught the younger students on the other.

PLEASANT VIEW SCHOOL

As attendance grew, the school was organized as a “town school” in 1906 with a five member school board. James William Green was Dewey’s first eighth grade graduate in 1907. Green then took a two-year business course at the University Preparatory School in Tonkawa. Afterwards, he returned to Dewey where he was involved in creating and documenting some of Dewey’s early history.

Eventually, the wood-frame school was replaced by a tworoom stone structure at the location of the current Dewey elementary school. According to J.W. Green, “The stone for the school came from Post Oak Creek and father, who was a stonemason, supervised the construction.” Many Dewey men volunteered to drive wagons to the quarry and hauled rock to the building site. The two-room rock school was outgrown when the

oil boom hit Dewey. Soon after statehood arrived, bonds were approved to replace the rock school. The new building was completed in 1912. Unfortunately, the new school burned less than two years later. At that time, classrooms were established in churches and spaces around town and the students attended half-day classes until the school was rebuilt.

The Allen daughter, Ida Grace Allen, was Dewey born in 1902, attended elementary school in Dewey, and graduated from Dewey High School. She then received her B.S. degree from the Central State University Teacher’s College at Edmond. Three weeks before her eighteenth birthday in 1920, Ida Allen began teaching second grade at Dewey, a position she held until her retirement 46 years later. To this day, family stories contain memories of Miss Ida Allen who taught generations.

The oil and gas boom fueled the establishment of “Lease Schools” in oilfield areas and the Steel’s Camp and Truskett Schools, in the Hogshooter area, were greatly influenced by the influx of oil boom fortune seekers.

The Wayside/Ayetla School, northeast of Dewey, often reached student overflow capacity; therefore, the Blue Mound School was established in 1912 and the Scudder School in 1914. The schools were strategically placed to ease the growing pains of the Wayside one-room school. Scudder School classes continued until 1939 when the students attended Wayside before being annexed to Dewey in 1949 with the Blue Mound School. The Blue Mound school building was eventually moved to Dewey, occupied by the Assembly of God Church at Highway 75 and 9th Street, and later became an antique store.

An early forerunner to Fish Creek School began in the 1880s two miles east and south of Fish Creek. In 1902, a wood-framed Fish Creek School was built and burned northwest of Oglesby. A third Fish Creek School was built further southeast and that building was badly damaged by a tornado in 1909. A woodframed school was then rebuilt south of Bartlesville along present Highway 75 at Road 2400. In 1939-40, President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) built stone structures for the Fish Creek and Limestone schools. In 1950, the Middale and Limestone Schools consolidated; joined by Rice Creek in 1958 and Fish Creek in 1959. The Fish Creek building became the Moose Lodge in 1960, which was destroyed by fire on January 7, 1996.

Washington County subscription schools began slowly fading into the sunset with the passage of the Curtis Act of 1898, which authorized the establishment of free public schools. Then, in 1899, a Bartlesville city ordinance was passed to levy taxes to support public schools and word spread quickly that Bartlesville would be providing free education. The result was an influx of rural families moving into Bartlesville to take advantage of this educational opportunity. Many of the rural one-room schools continued to be utilized until towns were formed and then the schools were consolidated.

The Bartlesville school board was presented with the challenge of quickly locating rooms or buildings to house the first

free school session which began October 1899 at the Methodist Church. Some students had been introduced to the “Three Rs” in a home school setting offered by parents or older siblings but for some children, this opportunity was their first access to education. By the end of 1908, there were twenty school districts and eighteen substantial school buildings in Washington County.

In the 1920s, horse-drawn school busses allowed easier access to schools in further locations and prompted consolidation. Luckily, on October 15, 1921 the Washington County Superintendent of Public Schools, Miss Mary Richards requested Elmer J. Sark perform a “County Photographic Survey” of 32 schools to include all school buildings, teachers, and pupils in Washington County. Between October 15th and 21st, Sark and local photographer, Frank Griggs, joined forces to photograph the Owen, Wiley, Cotton Valley, Pleasant View, Pleasant Grove, Antioch, Vera View, Vera Central, Sequoyah, Riverside, Oak Grove, Tyner, Oglesby, Pleasant Valley, Ochelata, Matoka, Fish Creek, Copan, Hillside, Rice Creek, Steel’s Camp, Truskett, Midway, Hillsdale, Blue Mound, Scudder, Wayside, Limestone, Highland Park, Lake View, Oakland, Circle Mountain schools. The results of their effort became a detailed pictorial history of early Washington County schools at that time.

Gone is the sound of the school bell, ringing to summon the students to class, but one-room schools will forever hold their place in history as the Backbone of American Education. For a unique one-room school experience, please visit the Nelson Carr One-Room School at the Bartlesville Area History Museum, the Diamond Point One-Room School in Nowata, the Caney Historical Society Museum One-Room School in Caney, KS or the Scudder One-Room School at Prairie Song, I.T. (built-in memory of three notable one-room school educators: Susie B. Keefer, Ida Allen, and Eva Rider).