The first school I ever attended was a one-room country school, located a mile north of our house, near Vishnu Springs in western McDonough County. Fortunately, the road to Martin School was graveled, so it was easy walking, even for a six-year-old who was in first grade. My brother, Roger, was a seven-year-old second grader, so we walked together until we met up with a neighbor boy about a half mile down the road. We then crossed the county road and continued for the rest of our long walk until we finally arrived at the small, wooden school house, where we spent our school day with about fifteen other kids, in grades one through eight.
The teacher had already arrived, and if the weather was chilly, she had started a fire in the stove. The older boys at school had carried wood in on the previous day. The school didn’t have running water, so we pumped water from the well in the yard, and almost everyone simply drank from the same cup. It always hung upside down from a wire hook, and we considered it clean if we rinsed it out before we drank from it.
One big, eighth-grade boy actually drove an old pick-up truck to school, so he was considered an “older kid” for sure. And one girl rode her pony to school. It was simply tied up to the fence throughout the day, and it was always given some water from the well and some hay. It always seemed very glad to see its rider come out to get him and then ride home at the end of the school day. I thought that both of those youngsters must be “rich kids,” to have a truck or a pony to take to school every day.
All of us kids carried a lunch box to school, with a peanut butter sandwich, as well as an apple or other piece of fruit. The kids all knew each other well, but we didn’t share much food. If we didn’t like what was in our lunchbox, we were always expected to eat it anyway.
The students were all from the surrounding countryside. We placed our lunch boxes on a shelf in the cloak room, and that was where we also hung our coats, boots, gloves, scarves, or whatever else we needed to keep warm. On some winter days, the walk to school was a frigidly challenging experience.
The teacher was a young and unmarried woman, whose name I can’t remember. She was a very nice lady with dark hair. Our teacher always wore a dress and cotton stockings with black shoes. As in most country schools back then, she taught grades one through eight. Slate blackboards covered two sides of the school room, and she had several students at those blackboards, while others were reading their assignments and she was then working with another group. And yet the teacher seemed to know what was going on all the time, everywhere in the school room.
I remember that, at the end of the school year, we were loaded into the back of a stock truck and driven to Dickson Mounds, near Lewistown. At that time the Native American burial grounds were open, so museum visitors could see the actual bodies of the long-dead Native American men, woman, and children. And we walked around the area which those people had inhabited at a much earlier time. (As an adult, when I returned to Dickson Mounds, those burial places were all covered, out of respect for those earlier inhabitants.)
In any case, it was a very good educational experience for those of us who attended the Martin School. We generally related well to our classmates, despite the differences in age. As I recall, we did exhibit a general concern for each other, and we developed friendships, which continued through many lasting years.
