One Room Schools

We started school at a one room rural school called Union Valley. It was two miles from the house, one mile south and one mile east. This put it in Neosho County. I attended there from first through third grades.

It was a brick structure with a full basement and indoor plumbing, modern for a rural school in those days. It was kind of a social center for the community with box suppers, student performed plays, and other social activities. We walked to school on nice days and Mom took us to school on rainy or snowy days.

There were about a dozen students from the first through the eighth grades. We said the Pledge of Allegiance each and every day. There was a flag pole out in front of the school. Every morning some privileged student would raise the flag and every evening the flag would be lowered and carefully folded. The bell in the bell tower was the signal that school was beginning and tolled when recess was over.

We had the traditional swings and slide out on the front lawn. We used to take the waxed paper from our sandwiches and sit on it a few times going down the slide. Wow, that made it fast. Speaking of sandwiches, Mom frequently made us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I guess I must have had enough of them, can’t stand peanut butter and jelly in the same sandwich to this day.

I don’t remember what grade I was in when our teacher called myself and a couple of other students up to her desk to read. We did it that way so as not to disturb the other students. I needed to tinkle but was afraid to tell her. We weren’t at her desk very long when finally my little bladder said no more and let go. I yelled at her “see what you made me do” then left a trail all the way to the back where the boys room was located.

Another time I and another student were in the basement painting pictures with Tempera paint. I managed to spill the green paint. I knew the teacher would throw a snit fit if she saw the mess so I started to paint everything on my paper green in an attempt to use up the spilled paint. The sky was green, The grass was green, the tree, the swing in the tree, everything was green. I broke out in a cold sweat when I heard her coming down the steps. Sure enough she through a snit fit. She probably went home that day and took a couple of aspirin.

For the fourth grade we had moved from the home place to another farm south and west a ways. This was an old farm house. It had not been lived in for quite some time so we had a lot of work to do to make it habitable. We painted, papered, and worked our buns off. Dad made a metal chimney for the wood heating stove. We dug two holes for the outhouse so now we could go with a friend if we wanted. There were two barns on the place, we never did anything with them. We had an area west of the house fenced off for a calf. Rod and I got into trouble a couple of times for riding that calf. There was an apple orchard east of the house which required a lot of cleaning to make it look presentable. The garden area between the house and the orchard had been completely overgrown with weeds. We worked for hours cleaning that area out. All the buildings that made up this home are now gone, nothing is left but an empty field.


We went to a one room school called Maple Grove. Miss Travis was our teacher. Maple Grove was an older wooden structure with no plumbing. That means we had a boys and a girls out houses behind the school. It was heated by a wood stove, someone came in early, maybe Miss Travis, to get the building warmed for us before we arrived. Our coats were hung on hooks in the back of the room. We didn’t have a bell tower, simply a hand bell to call the students to school in the morning and at the end of recess. We did have erasers, the kind that when cleaned left a cloud of chalk dust in the air and on the cement steps where they were cleaned.

Along with learning math and English, this is where I learned to fry ants with a magnifying glass. Poor little critters never had a chance.

There were only about eight or ten students there. One of them was a kid a couple of years older than myself. His name was Eddie. I used to call him Teddy Bear which he never liked. One day he told me to never do it again. The next day I did, he grabbed me by the sleeve, hauled me out to the front lawn and punched me in the face. Along with frying ants I learned to never call him Teddy Bear again.

There is now only a field where Maple Grove once stood, there is nothing left to indicate there was ever a school there. That is kind of sad but, Maple Grove met the same fate as thousands of other rural schools spread across the plains.