Keokuk County Iowa IAGenWeb - 1904 School Essay Contest

Our schoolhouse was built in the year of 1864 and has been very well attended by pupils of our district and some of other districts until recently. For the last five or seven years pupils of our district have been attending school in three different towns; respectively, Thornburg, Nassau, and Tilton. For that reason, we have been reduced from thirty-five to nine in number. The meetings that have been held in our schoolhouse are religious meetings, school meetings, literacies, and ten cent shows. The school yard was not mowed last summer. Last year we planted some peach seeds and some plants but we have had good luck with them. The men and women of prominence who once attended our school are: one lawyer, Harve Vanlaw; three telegraph Operators: Edwin Owen, Harry Jennings, and Frank Perry; four or five business men, the Wainwright brothers, Rudolph Draegert and others; two shoemakers, Charles and Fred Winders; one section foreman, George Vanlaw; ten school teachers, Anna Wolf, Blanche Conoway, Maud Mikesell, Hanna Vanlaw, Emma Draegert, Frank Rugg, Mabel Atwood, S.A. Molyneux and others; many successful farmers and some not so successful; abundance of good housewives.

The schoolhouse is about 38 years old but does not look bad for one standing that length of time. It has white paint on the outside. The roof leaks a little and the plastering is falling off. The desks are broken and weathered very much by jackknives. There are enough double seats for twenty-four pupils. The paint on the black board is almost a thing of the past. The window curtains are good stayers. They never move by spring. The roads nearby need grading.

We have four wall maps and one globe. Three of the maps were new this year. The walls are well decorated with many small pictures: one in frame of Mr. McKinley, his wife and mother, which belongs to a former teacher. Our chart is nearly gone and our dictionary is in the same condition. We have twenty-three library books; some are for little children and some are for older children. The water bucket, dipper, pen, coal pail, shovel, hatchet and poker are in good condition. The teacher’s chair is classed with the chart and dictionary and is liable to land the teacher in the middle of the floor most any day. Of course, this is a country school containing but one room, nine feet high, twenty feet wide and thirty feet long.

Our school yard consists of one acre on which we have thirty-seven trees in fair condition considering the battle they fought with the ice some few weeks ago; also, a good pump and coal house, and a garden of liveforever. The yard has no fence on two sides.

Jennie, Albert, and Charley Molyneuz; Pearl, Jennie, and Harry Hill; Vera Kline; Lucy Raymond and Alton Draegert; Eli, Cecil and Gury Strasser are the pupils who come this term. Several of the pupils need new books so the first thing the teacher did was to examine the latest copyright of every book in the school. And learning that some of them were many years older than himself, explained the matter to the board and now we are up to again and the books are twice as interesting.

In the near future we should have a new stove; placed in the corner of the room with a jacket around it. Then we would have room for single seats which we long for more than anything else. As for the apparatus, the president of our school board told our teacher that he would try to get anything that the school needs. The rest of the things that we long for will probably no come until we have township schools. Then we can have papers containing current events.

We can have curiosity tables, beautiful pictures, slate blackboards, a basement with furnace, carpenter tools, and lunch tables. I think the time is not far off when one teacher will not be required to teach all the grades taught in one school and then we will have a chance to learn twice as much as we do now.