Week 37 - Back to School - Tracing My Irish Roots

52 Ancestors – 52 Weeks

The prompt for this week is “back to school.” I always feel a bit nostalgic this time of year when school starts. I have always loved school. My sister and I spent hours playing school in the upstairs storage room in the farmhouse where we lived. We both loved being the teacher and would try to coax our brothers, both younger than us, to be our students. This notion did not always go as we planned, but we would get As for effort.

I come from a long line of teachers, i.e. my mother, both grandmas, aunts, uncles and cousins. My mother, two grandmas and a few aunts taught in one-room rural schools.

One-room rural schoolhouses dotted the Wisconsin landscape to a number of 6200 at their peak in the 1930s. By the 1960s most of them had been closed. Women in our family usually taught some years before marriage and once a child was on its way they stayed home and became full-time wives and mothers.

My mother attended Outagamie County Normal School in Kaukauna, Wisconsin for one year to earn her teaching license. A normal school is an institution created to train high school graduates to be teachers by educating them in the norms of pedagogy and curriculum. The first public normal school in the United States was founded in Concord, Vermont, by Samuel Read Hall in 1823 to train teachers. (1) Normal schools were established in many Wisconsin counties at the beginning of the 20th century in response to a teacher shortage. The Kaukauna county school was established in 1912 and one year later graduated its first class of eight students, all females.

Mother taught in a one-room rural school for 12 years from 1936-1947 before she got married. The one-room school that I remember her talking about was Bell Corners School, in Nicholson, Town of Bear Creek, Wisconsin. While teaching there, she lived with her parents who lived less than 10 miles from the school. I remember driving by the school many times as it was not too far from where I grew up. It was used as the town hall after being closed as a school.

Teachers in one-room schoolhouses taught all subjects in grades 1-8. I remember mother telling stories about her experiences. Teachers were responsible for all aspects of teaching students and maintaining the building. She was responsible for getting to school early enough in the morning to light a fire so the room was warm when the students arrived. She was lucky that her parents lived closed to the school and her dad would accompany to school and start the fire. The older students assisted with tasks like clapping erasers, washing the blackboards, sweeping and cleaning the classroom and outhouse, bringing inside firewood and raising the flag each morning and taking it down at the end of the school day. She would put out the fire at the end of the school day. Once in awhile mother would tell a story about one of her students. This would usually happen when something remarkable happened in his or her life such as a marriage or birth of a child.

When my brother died in 2015 one of my mother’s former first-grade students came to his funeral, which was quite a distance for him to come. I did not speak with him but my sister did. The former student told her that he saw my brother’s obituary in the newspaper. My mother’s maiden name was listed and he put two-and-two together and figured this was her son. This is another instance where we never know how much we are having an affect on those we meet in life.

Students generally walked several miles to and from school. All Wisconsin adults my age have heard stories as children from grandparents and parents about walking to school through rain, heat and mountains of snow (just like the mail carrier).

There are one-room schoolhouses still standing in rural Wisconsin. They have been turned into homes, museums, gift shops and even B & Bs. They remind of us of another time, simpler in so many ways than the world of 2020.

For fun, I tapped into the Wisconsin teacher licensing database to see if my mother’s name was still present. It is not, but her sister, who was a teacher for dozens of years remains in the database. She passed away at age 94 in 2012. I also looked for my license and that of my sister Jean Terry. I found those licenses too. We both received lifetime licenses, which have been classified as expired because we have not taught for many years. The requirements for relicensure are stated on the licensing documents. I can still remember how excited I was when I got my lifetime license after teaching for three years.

For a blast from the past I put a copy of my licensing document and first contract below.