HISTORIC SITES IN MY OWN BACK YARD: ONE-ROOM SCHOOLHOUSES

TOOLING AROUND on a mild January afternoon, I came across a community hall that, in an earlier life, served as a one-room schoolhouse in Western Placer County (California.) This got me thinking about the old one-room schoolhouses and how they were our first foray into public education. I began to compare the enormity of yesteryear – 17 to 30 kids ranging from six to sixteen all in one room – with the enormity of today. I was reminded that the teacher’s job has never been easy.

If I hadn't parked that blasted motorbike in the way, the discerning eye could see that the old Fruitvale schoolhouse had been added-on-to in order to accommodate an expanding population of kids from this rural area. Behind the porch is the original structure. To the left is one of the additions.

Back in the days before lawsuits and insurance riders, a rope flung over a stout oak limb and tied securely to a weathered old two-by served as a fine swing. Imagine the sample here tied with sisal, you know the stuff: the fibrous rope, that, when new, leaves painful tiny splinters in soft fleshy hands. Here modern nylon that works but never quite feels right has replaced the authentic.

Tarrying beneath that grand oak would come to a halt when one of the older boys – they didn't allow girls to do this – tugged on the (again sisal) rope, clanging the bell, alerting all that class was about to take up.

I imagine those who lingered by the rope swing a bit too long, or found a bit too much of interest on the long morning walk to school entered to regret their tardiness, back in the days when the board of education was a paddle.

A second wing was added at some point. Closed in the 50s, the old schoolhouse serves as a home base for Fruitvale area 4-Hers. In the foreground, someone has cut up some oak into rounds. One the opposite side of the schoolhouse, a shed houses bales of straw for some project or another. Peeking inside, a bunny is housed in a hutch near the rippled glass window in order to absorb some winter rays. Kids are still learning stuff – real stuff – at the old Fruitvale Schoolhouse.

ON TODAY’S OUTING, I’d already paused at the nearly forgotten site of Manzanita School. Long since razed, it leaves only a weathering concrete foundation located in the middle of a cemetery of the same name maybe four miles west of Fruitvale…

…accessed by taking the gravel Chamberlain Road east from state route 65 three miles north of Lincoln.

Positioned where it was, my imagination tells me that a Margaret Hamilton look-alike schoolmistress (think Wicked Witch of the East) could point out the window at the many, aging graves and pull back into line even the squirreliest of young male pupils - such as myself.

ON MY EVER-EXPANDING BUCKET LIST is to visit a few of these sites on those winter sojourns where the radius of exploration is limited by the drop in temperatures at the end of a very short day. Most of these intersections I think I know from “tooling around” on the Guzzi or the Beemer. I suspect that remnants of concrete or brick foundations – like that of Manzanita School – will serve as the only evidence that these little learning centers ever existed. More lasting, perhaps, must be the educational foundation provided by the school marms to each and every one of her rural charges, teaching them reading so they could understand the Constitution and the Bible; writing, so they could communicate in the days when “Twitter” was simply the melody a song bird carried; and arithmetic, so they could help with feed and fencing and cooking from scratch.

Foundations indeed.


NOTE: One-room schoolhouses dot our historic past. There’s a great hall off highway 16 in the Capay Valley (Yolo County, CA); one up on Table Mountain ay Cherokee (Butte County, CA) and another one up that way at Oregon City.

The Church of the Open Road invites you to comment on relics such as these found in your neck of the woods.

© 2012
Church of the Open Road Press