One of the treats at Steuben County Fair is visiting the one-room school, operated by Steuben County Historical Society. This is one of almost 400 such schools that once were scattered across the county, and this particular one was moved from Babcock Hollow. Some folks renew old memories, while other (and younger) folks find out what school was like in days gone by.

Nobody had a car. Nobody had a bike. The five-year-olds walked, and the teacher walked, unless she got a ride in a horse-drawn buggy.

Nobody got a hot lunch, unless they lived close enough to run home at noon. Everybody else carried their cold lunch with them, or went without. The teacher couldn’t get any coffee, unless she heated it on the wood stove. There was no electricity, so they needed oil lamps on cloudy days. They used outhouses out back.

Everybody sat in one big room, and they all had the same teacher. She taught the five-year-olds to read, and she taught the teenagers to do algebra. But most teenagers quit to go to work, especially the boys, even before they finished eighth grade.

Sometimes parents dropped off kids too little for school, and the teacher had to baby-sit while she taught.

The teacher prepared all the lessons, and graded all the papers. She cleaned the school. She had to lay the fire in the heating stove, and maybe chop the wood. She probably had to board with the closest family, and if she got married, she usually had to quit!

There’s a lot of nostalgia about one-room schools, but like everything else they hd their good points and their bad points. State law let people teach in one-room schools even if they were still teenagers and didn’t have much training. Usually they didn’t get “promoted” to bigger schools.

Some teachers were great, and they have become the stuff of movies and legends and TV shows… an assertion that all was right in America, in those simple rural days before so many people lived in cities. Other teachers, though, were incompetent, appalling, predatory, or abusive.

Some students went on to become doctors and lawyers and generals and corporate presidents. But one-room schools were dead ends for many others. Even in the 1950s, scarcely half of the one-room students in the Corning area went on to high school.

The one-room schools seem like a piece of Americana, but it was mostly northern and western Americana. When unreconstructed Confederates seized the state governments of the south – often by force – one of the first things they did was close the public schools that had been opened by the postwar biracial governments. The white supremacists were determined to keep whites as well as blacks uneducated and economically desperate, so that the leaders could barter the labor of the poor. The one-room school wasn’t perfect, but it offered at least the HOPE of a chance to rise.

Anyhow – while you’re at the fair, stop in at the one-room school! Bring the kids! Try out the old games, look at the photos of hundreds of schools, and tell YOUR stories.

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We went to one-room schools in Steuben County!

Joe Paddock (Brundage [Cold Springs] School): veterinarian, president of Steuben County Historical Society

Tom Watson (Red School House): president of IBM

Benjamin Bennitt (Mount Washington School): lawyer, lieutenant colonel in the Civil War, Judge of Sessions

W.W. Averell (Gulf School): West Point graduate, Civil War general, diplomat