County school house tour opens doors to 19th century education
Six one-room school houses opened their doors to children and adults alike on Saturday, Sept. 6, for the Butler County Historical Society’s first ever schoolhouse driving tour.
The self-guided tour offered people not only a glimpse into the physical location of each of the participating school houses, but a look into the different aspects of education and life of the time that each school would have been open.
The Thompson School House on W. Liberty Road in Brady Township, for example, had information all about recess and recreation of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The volunteers inside, Sky Pfahl and Debbie Sale, spoke about what children would have done for fun when they weren’t learning inside the school house, while also offering some insight as to how class commenced there.
Pfahl stood by a table that carried wooden tops, ball-in-a-cup and marbles. However, he said a former student of the school, which closed in 1963, told him another game listed on the cards at the school Saturday was the most fun to play.
“One of the alumni said Andy Overball was the most popular game,” Pfahl said. “It was sort of like baseball and dodgeball.”
Mackenzie Herold, who will soon become executive director of the Butler County Historical Society, said the organization put together the driving tour to let history buffs see several historic sites of the same type in one day. She said representatives of the six schools that comprised the tour were happy to be part of this inaugural event by the historical society, although it is a similar event to its annual History Day.
Giving each school house a category to specialize in for the day was another way of expanding the educational reach of the event.
“Ours here is curriculum, so we have school books out and some spelling boards,” Herold said, between speaking with people about the Little Red School House, where she was posted Saturday. “It would have been used here in the late 1800s, early 1900s.”
Other schools open for the tour Saturday were the Foltz School in Brady Township, Crocker School in Slippery Rock Township, Sample School in Cranberry Township and Six Points School House in Allegheny Township.
Although each school covered a different topic of one-room school house education, visitors could also learn about the individual school houses themselves, when they opened and what became of them after they stopped educating students.
Sale said the Thompson School House closed at the same time as the Foltz School, because the school district at the time was consolidating students into fewer buildings that were more centralized. She said that by that point, the school only had students in first to third grades, but in the days when it educated children in grades first through eight, the room would get a little crowded.
“This was grades one to eight, one teacher, and attendance would vary,” Sale said. “There would be other students here and they would be allowed to help students of a lesser grade. Maybe the third graders were doing math, somebody got stuck, maybe a fourth grader was next to them and they could help.”
Aside from knowledge, each school gave out stickers for visitors’ “report cards,“ and visiting three different stops gave attendees a chance to win one of seven raffle baskets.
The Yoho family, of New Castle, had aspirations to visit all of the school houses Saturday. Joi Yoho said her son, Orion Yoho, 11, was particularly fond of maps and the history of cartography.
“Everything old he is interested in,” she said. “He literally has 1870s maps that he looks at and compares to maps in other times.”
Herold said about an hour into the tour day Saturday that attendance had been coming in waves, but she hoped the event garnered enough interest to do it again next year. Pfahl said the event could be improved in subsequent years by the addition of more activities, or even more one room school houses getting on board.
However, Saturday may have been one of the last times the Thompson School House would be open to the public. Although the building had been Brady Township’s municipal building until last year, Sale said it may be sold to a new owner.
“We were fortunate enough to be able to open here, but they told me they are selling this building,” Sale said. “This is probably the last time it’s going to be open to people.”
