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TOP STORY OF THE DAY: One-room schools still bringing former students together
HOOSIERVILLE — A group of individuals who have more than one thing in common has begun a series of get-togethers aimed at one thing: Sharing their stories.
Though they all hail from similar experiences — walking to school uphill both ways, for example — perhaps the most significant common thread is gaining their primary education in a one-room schoolhouse.
One-room buildings, or “schoolhouses,” were a common site throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. As the frontier moved west and populations grew behind it, the one-room style of bringing every grade together in one room became obsolete.
However, what never became obsolete were the Hoosiers who filled them.
Martha Stout, who started with the idea of simply sharing one-room stories, gathered at least two dozen of these former students Wednesday at Union United Methodist Church in Hooserville for the first of what is expected to become a series of storytelling events.
“I just wanted to get other people’s stories,” Stout said. “I thought about it for a long time. About a year and a half ago I put an ad in the Brazil paper, and only about three people called me. So I kind of let it go a while and I talked to Bonnie Stough-Schultz and told her what I wanted to do.
“I’m not connected with a lot of people anymore and she said she would love to help me on that. She was really the one who dug in and got the names and the phone numbers we could call,” Stout who currently resides in Evansville, continued. “She was godsend.”
The pair have even taken the time to listen and put pen to paper for each former student, beginning last week during the meeting.
Two such former students were Dick Stearley and Harold “Buddy” Knox, who shared their stories with this reporter Wednesday.
“You had one big stove — no jackets, just one big cast iron stove,” 95-year-old Stearley said. “It was the worst in the winter. It was cold. I went to Roadman. Doc Raefer [sic] from Clay City, they called him. He made it up to Prairie City since he came up from the south. It was Old 59 at that time. But he couldn’t get through to (State Road) 42 over to the church because it thaws in February ... in a horse and buggie. That was when I was a boy. There were a lot of mud roads around. There was no blacktop.”
Knox, also known as Buddy, attested to Stearley’s comments about the roads, saying they simply did not exist at certain point of the year.
Snow days were also persistently absent from the school’s policies.
“You either made it to school or you didn’t,” Knox said. “The teacher had a heck of a job, teaching eight grades. What you didn’t realize was, you was constantly getting preview and review of your studies. You couldn’t help but hear it. Somehow we got an education.
“We’ve seen a lot in our lifetimes: The Big Depression, World War 2, Korea. (Dick) was in Korea, so was I,” Knox added. “I guess you might say we should’ve made notes because we can’t remember everything we went through.”
“One-hundred-and-fifty-one days I was on the front line,” Stearley said of his time on the Korean Peninsula. “I remember that.”
As winter sets in, Stout and Stough-Schultz plan to host more events for the former students. They are currently recording and transcribing stories from every individual taking part, and plan to release those stories to the Brazil Times in the coming weeks.
More information about one-room schoolhouses and historic preservation in the Hoosier state can be found at www.in.gov (https://www.in.gov/dnr/historic-preservation/files/hp-IndianasRuralSchoolhouses.pdf).