The 20th century saw so many changes – inventions in transportation and communication, entertainment, technology, electricity and plumbing. Schools were, of course, not immune from these. Here in Hampton, the seven one-room schoolhouses that educated students in grades one through eight became three schools serving students in first through third grades, fourth, fifth and sixth, and seventh and eighth, until 1950 when all elementary school students attended the newly built Hampton Consolidated School. Changes, from disciplines to discipline, were, and remain, continual; yet just like “reading and writing and ‘rithmatic”, what hasn’t changed are the tools used to educate students: the curriculum, the materials, lessons and, most importantly, the people who articulate it. Here, the words of the teachers and their students, instruct us on:
Teaching in One Room Schoolhouses
From the Hampton Gazette, article titled “Looking Back”, March, 1992, an interview with Lois Woodward:
Everyone brought their lunch. She started heating tomato soup, which she brought herself, so children could have something hot with their sandwiches. The School Board got really upset over that. Then the Parent Teacher Association got into the act, and soon PTA members were bringing cases of soup to the school, the forerunner of a hot lunch program…Her supervisor got really upset as did the school board when she bought some fine muslin material and made curtains and tie-backs for all the windows. They brightened up the room and the children loved them, but the critics considered them dust collectors. She kept the curtains up, took them home and washed them periodically, and eventually the furor died down.
Pearl Scarpino
From Hampton Remembers:
Did you ever hear the story of how I was sneaked into Hampton to teach here? Well, Mr. Frost, the Superintendent, hired me through a teaching agency in Boston and when I arrived on the train in Willimantic I was met by Miss Gamble, the Supervisor, who told me gently that the town they had hired me for didn’t want me and they had another job that was in the town of Hampton. They didn’t want the Hampton school board to know I was a cast-off so I wasn’t to mention it. Miss Gambel brought me to Hampton and settled me into Mrs. Wilson’s temporarily. Since the name Hampton had only been mentioned once, I had forgotten where I was and I couldn’t let on I didn’t know so I waited and wondered for days until eventually when the mail came I rushed out to grab the letters and read the address – and then I knew where I was
Lois Woodward
When I was eighteen I started teaching school in Hampton, and taught seven years at Clark’s Corner and two at the Center School. Each was a one room school, all eight grades in the same room…The school house had no electricity, plumbing or furnace. On dark days we used kerosene lamps…Of course there was an outhouse and the water system was a covered water tank with a faucet which was filled every morning by a pupil who carried a pail of water from Mrs. Jewett’s. By my time the one tin cup had been replaced by cone-shaped paper cups…I had to build a fire every morning and eventually learned how to bank it at night so there would be some live coals the following morning. By adding some kindling and logs, I could get the room warm quite quickly. Of course over the weekend the building became icy cold. I always went to the school Sunday afternoon, started the fire, swept the floor, dusted, did the board work and prepared my lesson plans for the week. While the room was heating up, I’d get my work done. We had very few books and only one dictionary and no encyclopedia so I bought an encyclopedia of my own which we used while I was there…I also bought the Hartford Courant which we read in school daily and then I sent it home to one or another family, those who didn’t take a paper.
Anna McDermott
I went to Appaquag school when my sister Annie was the teacher there when she was only seventeen… the older children helped the younger children, and we studied while the other class was up in front…the desks were mostly double. Only the upper grades, the really elite, had desks to themselves.
Helen Matthews
Every day we had assignments in reading, writing and arithmetic, history and geography and twice a week spelling and physiology. We had penmanship fifteen minutes every day. Each scholar had a writing book kept in the teacher’s desk. After we had practiced fifteen minutes with pen and ink on loose paper – an inkwell on each desk filled from the teacher’s bottle, we were allowed to copy one only in our book…in the wintertime it got so dark we couldn’t study and the way the teacher took care of that – she’d have a spellin’ match…we also had recitations, poetry and things like that, on dark winter days. We used to learn a lot of poetry by heart those days.
Arthur Kimball
The teachers those days, they were not encumbered with the laws that they have today that you couldn’t punish anyone – each one got his own deserts. They punished them by, well, shakin’ ‘em-up for one thing, maybe usin’ a ruler on ‘em, maybe a little tanning on the hide with a whip or a stick. I remember Daddy Potter was one of the teachers…he was kinda rough. Of course to start out with they’d ask the children what their name was. One fella spoke up kinda smart, he says “My name is Tobacca Juice.” So he hauls him outa his seat, rubs him around on the floor. He says “that’s what we do with tobacco juice”.
Harold Stone
Some of the teachers used rulers but we also had one teacher who had a hollow, red rubber hose that was fairly long and she doubled it up in the middle and would use it to keep some of the boys in line. She’d take them out into the hall and whip them on the posterior. So some of the fellows fixed that! They put a lot of pieces of chalk in the hollow rubber and when the teacher went out to give someone a trouncing all the chalk would go flying through the air and of course that would start up some more gales of laughter.
Ethel Jaworski
I started school at age seven at Clark’s Corner Goshen School. Viola Sokol was the teacher. In the first hour, I was in trouble. I must have said something wrong or off color. Anyhow, she washed my mouth with Lysol soap. Oh, it tasted terrible! I was very careful what I said after that experience.
Charlie Halbach
From the Jewett City Star, August 1, 1957
There are so many things we obtain in this world which we don’t appreciate till long afterward. I was thinking the other day of one of my old school teachers. I certainly did not appreciate what she was doing for me at the time, but she taught me more and did me more good than any other two teachers in my entire school career. She was not an easy teacher. No indeed. She was of the old school…I didn’t appreciate that teacher in those days, but if she happens to read this little piece, I hope she realizes how much I have appreciated her basic training since that time. Many times I have given silent thanks for the fine training received in the Goshen district school in the Clarks Corner section of Hampton, at the hands of a successful teacher whose name was then Anna Fitzgerald. ..May she live secure in the knowledge that she did her job well in the days when young minds were in her hands for her to shape and fill.
Clarence Kneeland
Note to Students: Anna Fitzgerald McDermott did indeed “read this little piece”, as we discovered it, worn and browned, with her most prized possessions. So, remember, your words matter. They are the world to the teachers who are so instrumental in giving them to you.