- SCHAEFER SCHOOL ABOUT 1946 – left row: ? Mettler, Marilyn Buehler; middle row: ? Mettler, Joyce Thum, Betty Conklin; right row: Gary Thum, ?, Peggy Schaefer
BY CRAIG WENZEL
Many South Dakota school kids hiked back and forth to school during the days of the one-room country school house.
Our parents –and grandparents– talked about walking through a blizzard, uphill BOTH WAYS, to get to learn the “Three R’s”.
Great Depression kids –wearing tattered clothes and riding Ol’ Bobbin’ to school– brought lunches of homemade bread and dried fruit. Often the bread was without butter, sometimes spread with rendered lard in order to get it down. Life wasn’t easy at the one-room schoolhouse. Kids did chores before leaving home and were expected to run errands for the teacher… sometimes going for another bucket of coal for the stove that stood in the classroom. Lucky ones got to bake a potato near the old stove, serving up a hot lunch on a cold day.
I went to “town school”, so don’t have anything but second hand stories about the one-room days in the country. Most of the stories, especially the ones from now-gone parents, spoke of hardship, cold weather and a solid education.
We would enjoy reading your one-room school stories in the “comments” box of this article. — Craig Wenzel – True Dakotan Editor
on Jan 5th, 2011 at 5:15 pm
I started at Eddy, just a mile and quarter south of our place. Dad, Mason, had attended there as did my brother, Bill. After my first grade Eddy was closed and I transferred to Schubert. By that time a second building was added to Schubert for the upper grades, 5 thru 8. Our teachers were Mrs. Kate Gunderson and Mrs Evelyn Spencer. The main building had a basement where we played our games during the winter months. Although I’m not “that old” I still like to amaze the kids down here about our outhouses. Everyone had to use the boys’ outhouse in the winter because the girls’ outhouse would fill up with snow and block the door shut. I was at Schubert until it closed and the 9 of us transferred to “town school”.