Dear
Friends,
Good morning. I thought of Robert
Leight as I traveled the scenic roads of Tinicum Township with Lynn Greeening,
the historian of Tinicum’s one-room schools. Greening has written books about
eleven of those fifteen schools and has plans to add the remaining four.
Leight is a Lehigh University
professor and former President of the Quakertown School Board. He is a product
of the one-room school. Like Greening, Leight wrote a dandy 254-page book
chronicling the nine one-room schools of Richland Township. Anyone interested
in Quakertown regional history should get a copy. Leight’s book begins in 1850,
five years before Quakertown Borough was carved out of Richland.
Tinicum’s schools started earlier.
The fifteen were spread around geographically so children had no further than
two miles to walk to school. Can you imagine what parents would say today if
kids had to use leg power?
Greening supplied the names of the schools and when
they were built: Spruce Hill and Rock Ridge in 1844; Point Pleasant, Concord,
Ridge Valley, Sundale, Permanent School (isn’t that a descriptive name?), Brick
Church, and Union in the 1850’s; Clay Ridge and Mr. Airy in 1865; Erwinna,
1867; Oak Grove, 1870; Red Hill and Uhlerstown, 1872. And she knew the prices,
which three of them brought at auction in 1960…between $3,900 and $5,400.
Before
Pennsylvania mandated that a public education was necessary to create literacy,
churches ran schools. Richland Meeting offered Quaker schooling for the region
until 1850 and Catholic parishes did too. Colleges were associated with the
church as well. For example, in the 1600’s and 1700’s, the eight Ivy League
schools were created to produce teachers or preachers. The only exception was
the University of Pennsylvania whose founder, Benjamin Franklin, wanted his
school to teach utilitarian subjects like business, medicine and the law.
Greening interviewed more than 100 students, plus 12
retired teachers to compile the one- room school history. Each school took a
year to research and write. Greening had first hand knowledge…after all, she
attended the Erwinna School. Greening read through the Teacher’s Registry from
each school’s board of education. “They’re like the school diary,” she said. It
listed the names of the children and daily events.
“Teachers were noble,” Greening continued. “Older
kids taught the younger ones by example.” Think of having the same teacher for
eight grades. Wow! In 1865, the Permanent School teacher’s salary was $25 per
month. In 1905, it had grown to $35 per month.
There were plenty of gems in
Greening’s history of the Permanent and Erwinna Schools. Reading, literature,
grammar, arithmetic, geography, history, hygiene, spelling and penmanship were
the subjects. The kids had music and art. (In my view, the only missing
discipline was a foreign language.)
“We started each day with prayers,”
Mildred Hager Reigle wrote about her first grade experience in 1936. “And we’d
bake potatoes on the coal stove.”
Discipline was in plain evidence.
“Mrs. Overpeck tied me to my seat because I walked around a lot,” one former
Erwinna student recalled.
Arnold Hobson remembered swimming
the Delaware with his dog, Dusty. “If my father found out, he’d have killed
me,” he wrote.
Harvey,
Florence and Lester Swope avoided injury by getting into a wooden wagon and
flying past the farmer’s bull that chased them down the hill to the old Erwinna
Fire House.
Ah, what memories! It was a gentler time.
Greening
remembered what Leight said to her several years ago. “The best school is a one
room school if you have a good teacher,” he told her. It was true then and true
today…maybe not eight classes in one room…but the key to education remains
unchanged. It’s the teacher.
Sincerely,
Charles Meredith