Newcomers to the Cove: Schools

Nancy and I went camping several weeks ago at Black Moshannon State Park in northern Centre County. Several small villages thrived there from the early nineteenth century until the timber supply ran out. The Black Moshannon Creek was no longer needed to transport timber from the splash dam downstream to the mighty Susquehanna then to Williamsport where large lumber mills dominated the town. Two (now extinct) villages in the state park, Antes and Beaver Mills, shared a general store, a wagon shop, a blacksmith shop, mills, stables, a hotel with a tavern (the Antes House), a ten-pin bowling alley, and a one-room schoolhouse. The school still stands where Antes once thrived.

It reminded us of the old Dick Schoolhouse located, appropriately, at the corner of route 867 and the Dick Schoolhouse road near Roaring Spring.

My father attended a one-room school in Hannah Furnace, Taylor Township, Centre County. (Yes, there is a Taylor Township in both Blair and Centre Counties. My father was born in Taylor Township, Centre County; Mom was born and raised in Taylor Township, Blair County.) The Hannah Furnace School still stands.

I remember Dad spinning yarns about schoolboy pranks. He especially enjoyed telling about the day some rascal brought a shotgun shell to school and threw it into the hot pot-bellied stove. It supposedly cleaned out the stovepipe.

J. Marvin Lee, in his 1963 book, In the Shadow of Mount Nittany, quotes Jonas E. Wagner as he reminisced about his one-room school in Houserville, a small village near Lemont, Pennsylvania. Mr. Wagner, when writing about his six teachers during 12 years in that tiny school, notes that, "All of these people were mature, devoted to their work, and exemplary citizens. Measured in terms of modern educational training, they would have fallen short of qualifying for standard certification. It is likely, also, that they would not have fitted in so well with modern school practice. All of them belonged to an age when standards of discipline were high and methods of administering such were often crude; when exactness in learning was a religion even to the point of over memorization; when achievement was attained in the hard way; when a surfeit of attractive activities were still incubating in the minds of educators; when, in short, the procedure of the times would be regarded as very unorthodox in terms of the practices of today. But when weighed in the balances of ability to teach, devotion to duty, and the giving to boys and girls that spiritual something that made them to want more, they were not found wanting."

He also writes, "What teacher today could do any better with a schoolroom of some forty or fifty pupils, all ages from six to eighteen, with limited gradation standards, no library facilities, few helps, and practically no supervision. The County Superintendent of School (sic) usually paid an annual visit of an hour or so to a school, and the rest of the time the teacher was on his own."

Schools have changed since I was in the public educational system. I was in elementary (grammar) school in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Our elementary school building was the town's former high school. We had hot lunches but no cafeteria. We carried our trays from the kitchen to our classrooms and dined at our desks. We had no gymnasium or art room or music room. Our library was the Bookmobile. We simply had our six classrooms, one for each grade, and we learned every subject in "our" room. Yet, somehow, inexplicably, our education was not diminished.

In 1955, there were 2,437 public school districts in Pennsylvania. Around 1957 schools consolidated into jointures; today our commonwealth has 500 school districts, complete with Intermediate Units to support educational needs. We enjoy schools with gyms, sports fields for both genders, concert and marching band programs, drama and other arts, special programs for special needs kids, STEM, physics, vocational programs, history, libraries, foreign language programs, chemistry, "readin', writin' and 'rithmetic," and much more. Add to the mix highly educated teachers, professional staff, and excellent administrators and we soon realize how lucky our public school students are today!

But to my original point, the old Antes school is a reminder of an era long gone, that of the tiny school where students were of differing ages and endured vastly different pedagogy. Yes, the old Dick Schoolhouse still stands and the ideas created therein were taught in hundreds of other little schools in our area long before public education was mandated. I see shadows of them still today as the plain people of the Cove employ a similar type of educational system.

It still works.