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Date: 10/3/2023
LEVERETT — Viola Williams Black recalled walking around class as a child, during the winter, in a schoolhouse with only one room, in her socks.
“In the wintertime there was a woodstove in the middle of the room,” Black told her interviewer, a sixth grader at Leverett Elementary School. “There was a wrought iron fence around it, so we didn’t get burned. But when we came in from recess we would leave our boots there and hang our jackets and mittens, if they were wet, on the fence [and] we would be walking around in our stocking feet.”
Black passed away this year. Her charming recollection of life in a one room schoolhouse in Leverett, last experienced before the Consolidated School opened in 1950, was part of a project started six years ago in Alyson Bull’s sixth grade class. Sara Robinson, president of the Historical Commission, and Susan Mareneck, a member with Robinson of the town’s Historical Society, approached Bull with the need to preserve the living memory of people who attended a local one room school.
The timing of the project, the interviews captured in 2017 and 2018, a book and 35-minute film of the schoolhouse scholars, was fortunate. Robinson said half of the seniors interviewed died since the interviews. Poignantly, the sixth grade interviewers are now in 12th grade, on the verge of high school graduation and leaving the family nest.
Leaving the nest of a small school was a big deal for both young and old scholars. Seventy-five years apart, both sets of scholars were anxious at the prospect of going on to a bigger school in Amherst. It showed the young the details of school were different, so many decades ago, but the emotions kids went through probably were not.
“Growing up in a small school, with the same set of classmates, and then [going to] Amherst, a lot of the scholars talked about that as being nerve-wracking,” Bull said. She summarized the thinking of her students. “We had the same experience of growing up with this tightknit group of kids and now we’re going off to the regional, to be in a larger district. That’s scary and we’re wondering what’s going to happen.”
Writing was taught differently in the past. Penmanship was an important subject because the ballpoint pen was yet to be invented. The children dipped nibs into inkwells. Little girl’s pigtails were also dipped into inkwells, with predictable results.
Lee Glazier recalled that boys who were naughty and seriously disrupted the class were hit on the knuckles with a rubber hose. Punishment sometimes drew tears, Black said, but the other children ignored it. Black also recalled her teacher had a ruler, thicker than those given to students, that she occasionally used to keep order. The more common punishment — standing in the corner—wasn’t a strong deterrent.
“I don’t think it was very effective because the child in the corner would be giggling,” Black said. “We’d all be giggling, There wasn’t enough corners for us.”
Teachers taught up to eight grades in a classroom, though most had two or three. The youngest sat in the front rows. There weren’t many desks. Some schoolhouses had running water, most did not. Glazier and his wife, Marjorie, talked a lot about the lack of plumbing.
“What did we have for water? Jugs,” Marjorie said. “Where did we get it? Where ever they could find a well…And you all used the same dipper.”
“Sometimes the water, we had to go up to a house to get it,” Lee said. “Some of us, well, bad boys, wouldn’t make it to the house and we’d dip it into the brook. It was brook water.”
“When we wanted to go to the bathroom we had to raise our hand,” Marjorie said. “One hand meant you wanted to make water and if you raised two hands you wanted to move your bowels.”
Going to the bathroom meant going outside to the outhouse. Boys were often gone a long time. The teacher, Mrs. Lovely or Mrs. Dunbar, often found them playing in the brook.
Lawrence Wrisley went to the East Leverett School, as did Mareneck. They shared memories of the electronic turn-around, a flat platform that rotated. The boys would get the platform turning too fast for the girls to get on.
Wrisley recalled the playing field at East Leverett School was in a ravine. The teacher had to lead them across the street.
Fun memories of a time long past were not the only valuable learning from the project. Bull, a graduate of Antioch University, where she learned the value of critical inquiry and place-based learning, found the process of practicing history offered a great way to see how history is studied.
“What does a historian do?” Bull said. “They get to grapple with all of the steps in that process and not just answer questions on a worksheet…When you go through a project, do all the steps of that project, you internalize what it means to do real history, in the way you can’t with a textbook.”
The film of the project, edited by Toler Poole, received a Sept. 23 premier. Information about the book and the audio recordings made for the project, 10 to 1, Interviews with Leverett Scholars Who Studied in One Room Schoolhouses, can be found online at leverett.ma.us/p/92/Oral-Histories.