The room was decorated by the students. Art work, along with good spelling papers, etc. was hung on the walls. At Christmas, a live tree was cut from the woods and brought into the school. The students would make decorations for the tree and exchange names for their Christmas party. Other parties were held throughout the year such as Easter and Halloween. The students would also make Japanese lanterns for decorations.
Located on the premises were "Outhouses", a structure that served as a toilet. Some facilities had separate outhouses for the boys and girls while others shared one. Two girls would have to go to the outhouse together because if a girl went alone she often found herself locked in because the door sometimes didn't have a latch from the inside and the mischievous boys would lock them in. Where there was no outhouse available, the girls went to one side of the woods and the boys went to the other.
The playground was usually a large expanse of land, one of which covered three acres, and rarely was there a fence defining the area. A few of the schoolyards had swings, seesaws, a merry-go-round and monkey bars, but most were open areas where the boys played stick-ball or marbles. The girls usually played separately from the boys and jumped rope, played with their dolls, or made "houses" in the trees or around some rocks. Other games enjoyed by the children were mumbly peg and hoopie hide (today's hide and seek). Sometimes the boys would throw a ball over the school building and someone on the other side would try and catch it. When a student became ill or hurt, a neighbor would often take care of them until the parents got there. If an ill or injured student lived near the school, the teacher would send a student to get the parents.
Located somewhere near the school was a spring where they got their drinking water. Some schoolyards had a well with a pump. One student remembered sharing the same water trough that the cows used! Water was carried by the students or the teacher in a bucket and everyone used the same dipper and drank from the same bucket. Others brought their own cup, wrote their name on it and left it on the window sill. When they went out to recess, they would go pump themselves water into their cups. One school had no nearby water, and each day the older boys would go to a neighbor's house to get water for the day.
The floors were wooden covered with oil that helped preserve the wood and kept down the dust. Because most of the students went to school barefoot, they often went home with their feet black from the oil. Located in the back of the room was the cloakroom for student's coats, lunches, and the water bucket and dipper. It was also used as a store area where the teacher would sell candy bars and cakes for those who could afford them. There was a row of nails on the wall where the coats hung and underneath was a shelf where wet or muddy shoes were kept.
Most students reported sitting on wooden benches alongside several other students. Some remembered the wooden desks that had a hole for an ink well and had a flip top. Those that sat on a bench wrote on their laps on a slate while others used lead pencils and paper with a rough texture. The teacher's desk was on a raised platform with a bench in front where students would come up at their designated time to work as a group (separate grades). The students were placed in rows according to the grade level with the first grade up front progressing to the back of the room where students in the upper grades sat. Some schools only had around a dozen students while others had as many as 40 students. The children had to buy their own books but there were encyclopedias for their use. Some remember using the old "Primer".
All one room schools had a blackboard (today's chalkboard) and most were in front of the room. They were painted with blackboard paint that left a rough surface. One school had a blackboard that ran down the middle of the room that separated grades 1-3 from grades 4-7. Attached to a rope, it was raised during the day in order that all the grades were combined for group activity. One such activity was a talent show that was held every Friday. All the students participated by either singing, reading, or reciting poetry.
None of the early schools had electricity, and they were heated by burnside stoves, buck stoves or potbelly stoves. The county or town provided coal if it was used for fuel. In some instances, the parents brought wood for the stoves that used wood. Boys sometimes brought axes to school and chopped the wood before the winter months set in. They would cut the wood and the girls would carry it to the school in their dress tails (skirts). The fathers would help cut the wood while the teacher took the students outside to talk about the various plants as well as the animals.
Almost all the one-room schools had female teachers. One teacher reported that she had the responsibility for care of the school and was given a broom and 12 sticks of chalk for the year. She carried out the ashes but in one school the teacher paid an older boy to start the fire. He would come early and the teacher paid him a nickel every day. Before the year was out, she upped his pay to ten cents a day!
Students carried their lunches to school in a tin bucket or a "poke" (brown paper bag) and hung these "dinner pails" from a nail inside the cloakroom. There was no lightbread (sliced white bread) and students brought biscuits to school with everything from scrambled eggs to hogmeat, homemade jelly or applebutter and peanut butter. Some brought cornbread with soup beans and onions. A few recalled putting their lunches in the creek to keep cool, and they ate outside on the rocks or around the playground if the weather permitted. Some students would try to swap their lunches, a practice that continues today!