LEYDEN — Alumni of one-room schoolhouses in Leyden had arrived to help today’s Pearl Rhodes Elementary School pupils with their modern day studies.
Third- and fourth-graders were working on a year-long project about their town’s schools of yesteryear.
As it was beginning to snow on Friday afternoon, the students asked the elders what happened at their schools when it snowed. They were surprised to hear that there were no snow days back in the early 20th century.
They were less surprised to hear that the schools were heated with wood-burning stoves. The older students would arrive at school earlier than the others to gather firewood and start heating the building. It heated up quickly, and the only way to regulate the temperature was to open windows.
“I remember one time we were all standing around the piano singing, and I keeled right over because it was so hot,” said Marilyn Kugler, who went to Beaver Meadow School.
Getting firewood wasn’t the only job the students did. They brought drinking water in buckets and swept the floors. A student who misbehaved would have to erase and wash the blackboards and clap the dust out of the erasers.
“Ms. Rhodes didn’t want the older boys to go get water at the top of the hill. There were men up there with horses and they were logging, and the boys would go up and forget to come back,” said Ruth Tuller, who went to Center School where the teacher was Pearl Rhodes.
The conversation also went into the differences between one-room schoolhouses and modern schools where the students are separated by grades. The main difference, the elders said, was that there was collaboration across age differences, both educationally and socially. The older students helped teach the younger students, which strengthened everyone’s understanding of their material. It was jarring leaving Leyden, where there were only about 20 students in the whole school, and going to high school in Greenfield with a graduating class of around 200, the elders said.
The students are studying the schools themselves, and are doing hands-on historical work. In November the class visited a former one-room schoolhouse in Colrain called Four Corners School that was open from 1850 to 1938. The building is now owned by the Miller family, who lives on the neighboring plot of land, and it’s been restored with period-authentic desks and chalkboards to look the way it would have when it was in operation.
At the end of the school year, the Pearl Rhodes students will put together an interactive map for Leyden’s town website, showing where the old schools were and giving information about them, said Patty Solomon, their teacher. There may also be a community event where the students will tell historical stories about schools in Leyden.