CONNOQUENESSING TWP — Evelyn Hockenberry recalls her elementary school days with much happiness, even though the comfort of modern amenities was decades away.

Hockenberry, 96, lives just a few hundred feet down Double Road from the home where she grew up and left early each morning to walk to school in a one-room schoolhouse.

While a student in grades one through four, she attended the Buttercup School, which was on Evans City Road across from the current Boylan Funeral Home and Cremation Center.

When Hockenberry was a student in the rural school, students carried buckets of water from the building that is now the funeral home.

At that time, it was the palatial country residence of the George Spang family, who owned a manufacturing business in Butler.

The Spangs graciously allowed the school to send students to the home's basement to fill their buckets with spring water, which were carried back across Evans City Road to the school and dumped into a large container for the students' and teacher's drinking water.

“Everyone used the same dipper or cup to get a drink,” Hockenberry said.

Some of the water was used to wash up after a restroom visit or before lunchtime.

The school's oldest boys, who were in eighth grade, carried coal inside to fuel the pot-belly stove in the center of the classroom.

A square metal barrier around the stove prevented students from being burned.

“The ones who sat up by that barrier would be hot, but the ones sitting by the ratty old windows would be freezing,” Hockenberry recalled of the winter months.

Two unheated outhouses served as the boys and girls bathrooms, Hockenberry said.

Students had to supply their own paper, pencils and notebooks for their lessons at school.

“You did have an inkwell in your desk and the school supplied the ink,” Hockenberry said.

Regarding lessons, students in each grade level were called to the front of the room to the teacher's desk to get a lesson while those in the other seven grades worked quietly at their desks until it was their turn to approach the teacher for a lesson, Hockenberry said.

Students had one hour for lunch, which was carried to school in a round, tin lunchbox.

Hockenberry's mother usually packed a bolgona or peanut butter sandwich, a piece of fruit and a dessert each day.

“I remember the dessert Mom always made was two graham crackers with icing in between,” she said.

During recess, younger students played group games like tag while older girls paired off and chatted with one another.

Hockenberry, her sister and brother walked to school, using the fields to most efficiently access the schoolhouse instead of the winding Double Road to Evans City Road.

Her brother, Jim, often set traps to catch skunks and other animals so he could sell their hides for a few dollars.

Hockenberry said Jim checked his trap line on the way to school, and would reek of skunk all day if he had caught one.

The walk to and from school was long and hilly, but the children used the same route through the fields in all weather.

“Coming home, the last hill was so steep,” Hockenberry said.

Once at home, the young students completed their homework immediately so they didn't have to strain their eyes to the light of a dim kerosene lamp.

“I really liked school and I was a good student,” Hockenberry said.

When the Buttercup School became overcrowded, Hockenberry and her siblings were sent to the Graham School on Shannon Road, which also was a one-room schoolhouse.

She attended grades five through eight at the Graham School before moving on to Butler High School across from St. Paul Catholic Church in Butler, now Butler Middle School.

Hockenberry did not enjoy high school, as she preferred learning with her friends and neighbors whose country lives were similar to hers rather than students from the city and all over the county.

She said the students from country schoolhouses were treated differently than city children.

“I remember a gym teacher asking me which school I had come from, and I said 'Graham School,'” Hockenberry recalled. “The teacher said 'Never heard of it,' real sarcastically. You never forget those things.”

To get to high school, Hockenberry and her sister walked to the end of Double Road where it meets Evans City Road.

A Butler attorney by the name of Cochran picked up the Hockenberrys and a few other local teenagers, who he would ferry into Butler since he was on his way to the office near the courthouse.

The students would then walk to the red brick school, and walk back to the courthouse area at dismissal for a ride home.

“He was kind of absentminded, and he would pass Double Road,” Hockenberry recalled with a chuckle. “We'd say 'Mr. Cochran! Mr. Cochran! You missed our stop.'”

That situation added another half mile onto their trek back to the farm at the end of the day, she said.

Regarding Hockenberry's beloved Buttercup School, the book “School's Over!” by Butler historian Patricia Collins states that the schoolhouse was built in 1899 on land donated by Mrs. John Youkins with the understanding that the land be returned to her if and when it ceased to be used as a school.

The Buttercup School closed in 1956 and William Kreiss bought the land and building from Youkins, to whom the property had been returned.

Kreiss donated the old desks, seats and a large picture of George Washington that so many Buttercup School students had gazed at with reverie to the Little Red Schoolhouse on West Jefferson Street in Butler.

The Buttercup School later caught fire and burned down, the book said.

A short street near the site of the school, Buttercup School Road, commemorates the hundreds of students whose initial education took place within the one-room schoolhouse's walls.