School Notebook
My mother, born as Martha Spilker in 1913 on a farm near Stuttgart, attended all eight grades in a one-room schoolhouse.
She was the fourth of seven children. Her grade-school memories included the tin lunch bucket she carried from the farmhouse to Clearpoint School.
She remembered the tattered textbooks, used until they fell apart. She remembered the pot-bellied stove stoked during winter. She remembered playing tag and jumping rope at recess. She remembered the two-door outhouse, with a sun carved on the boys’ side and a crescent moon on the girls’ side.
When Martha was in the seventh and eighth grades, fellow students included her younger siblings, Mike, Clara and Edward.
“Some days I was assigned to teach reading or arithmetic to at least one of them,” she told me. “Our teacher stayed busy working with other pupils.”
— Jack Schnedler
Historic one-room schools now serve as museums
A sign inside the one-room Steele School at Scott Plantation Settlement suggests how small the student body could be at these rustic structures, once a common sight across rural and small-town Arkansas.
Propped against a window, the posting lists the names of teacher Winnefred Templeton and her student body during the school’s first year in 1868, just after the Civil War. Her roll call totaled three siblings: Thomas W. Steele Jr., Julia Steele and Nettie P. Steele.
Steele School is one of at least a half-dozen former one-room schoolhouses now serving as museum attractions in Arkansas. It is one of two at the Scott complex, a dozen miles southeast of Little Rock. Others can be visited in Parkin, Stuttgart, Mountain View and Searcy.
Primitive learning
Classroom conditions were often primitive, compared to the experiences of modern students who will head back to school this month. In the book “One-Room Schoolhouses of Arkansas as Seen Through a Pinhole,” by Thomas Harding, retired teacher Mabel Goree Bell described what it was like when she began work in Washington County in 1925 at age 20:
“There was no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no running water, no school nurse, no playground equipment, no library, no hot lunches, no music teacher, no air conditioning, no telephone, no school buses, no physical education instructor, no copy machine, no Venetian blinds, etc.”
All the same, she added: “I am thankful to have had my teaching experience in a one-room school. I taught for more than 30 years, and Skylight was my first love. The children and parents were good, kind, gentle people. And I have many happy memories. Now there is school no more on Skylight Mountain.”
Functioning one-room schoolhouses went nearly extinct by the middle of the 20th century. But some Arkansans may recall their parents or grandparents talking about the well-worn textbooks, the pot-bellied stoves, the recess fun. The teachers were almost always women like Mabel Goree Bell, known as “schoolmarms.”
The two former schools at Scott Plantation Settlement date from different eras. Herman Steele put up his namesake three years after the Civil War, using cypress wood. It was moved to the settlement earlier this century from the nearby Linwood Plantation.
Pemberton Schoolhouse dates to the early 1900s, when John Pemberton built it for his children and youngsters from neighboring plantations. Schoolmarms would travel from plantation to plantation, as a guide explains. They’d stay with the owners until it was time to move to the next small schoolhouse.
Both Scott Plantation schools have old-fashioned wood desks with tops that flip up to make storage space for books and other gear. A bookcase in the Pemberton building holds arithmetic books and the classic McGuffey Readers.
A one-room school that taught Black pupils from 1910 to 1948 occupies the grounds of Parkin Archeological State Park in Mississippi County. Northern Ohio School served the community known as Sawdust Hill, a company lumber town. After the Arkansas Parks Department acquired the property in the 1990s, the building faced demolition until its historical value came to light. A park interpreter shows visitors the interior, restored as it might have looked on a school day between 1936 and 1948.
The teacher’s desk sits below a large blackboard flanked by Arkansas and 48-star American flags. Eight tables and benches for five students each face her desk. Two wood-burning stoves are displayed along with lunch pails and other memorabilia. A paddle indicates that corporal punishment remained part of the curriculum back then.
A sign outside reports that lessons “revolved around the ‘three R’s’: reading, writing and arithmetic.” Class took place from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. “except in September and October. During those two months, students spent the morning picking cotton in the company-owned fields before they went to school.”
Preserved knowledge
One-room schoolhouses offer similar glimpses of the past at Ozark Folk Center in Mountain View, Museum of the Arkansas Grand Prairie in Stuttgart and Pioneer Village in Searcy.
It’s even possible to stay overnight in a renovated one-room school. Twelve miles southeast of Huntsville in Madison County, Ribbon Ridge Schoolhouse has been restored as a one-bedroom cottage with bathroom and kitchen.
Built in 1891, Ribbon Ridge functioned as a school until the early 1940s, averaging 16 students a year. On the Expedia booking site, reviewer Heather D. wrote: “As a teacher, I enjoyed reading through some of its history.” Debra H. wrote: “After my stay, I discovered that a distant relative had been a teacher there in 1903!”