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Exploring the memory
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- By Valeria Davis-Humphrey
- Wisconsin State Journal
Betty Schneider Manson and her Brooklyn School fourth-graders are about to take a trip. Together, teacher and students will step into the past -- Manson's past, in fact -- to explore the fading memory of one-room country schools.
It reminds former one-room school teacher Margaret Staley Hanson of the good, old days when teaching children was a community focus. |
Beginning April 30, all Oregon School District fourth-graders will get a first-hand look into the history of Midwest education. Dressed in knickers and pinafores, they'll visit an authentic restoration of the Dogtown School House on Whalen Road.
At one time, the former Oregon/Brooklyn School District, much larger geographically than it is today, had close to 30 country schools like the Dogtown School sprinkled in Dane, Rock and Green counties.
Manson's personal ties to those tiny schools are deep. She studied at the former Oakside School (once called Keenan School) on Highway B near McFarland from 1946 to 1954. Three generations of her family attended Oakside, including her father and her daughter, who was a member of the last kindergarten class in 1966.
But with two rooms, Oakside was considered a "big'' school with nearly 25 students. Manson's current class could have comprised a whole school 100 years ago, which she will explain by dividing them into smaller groups representing different ages and showing them how the teacher had to share her time.
"Their first impression is to ask, 'How old are you?' Manson said, laughing. "They must think it was about 300 years ago.''
The Dogtown School (later named Fish Hatchery School) moved to Whalen Road from its original McKee Farm location on Old Fish Hatchery Road. Its current owner, Phil Gorman, bought it in memory of his aunt, Margaret Lacy Gorman, who attended the school as a girl. Another of its former students, Lyman McKee, helped the Gormans recreate its interior from his memories.
The effort began a year ago, when Oregon Historical Society volunteers decided to give Wisconsin's Sesquicentennial special meaning for local school children. Since then, the project has gained community momentum and grown from capturing the old school district's history into a book, tourism map, school tours, a senior citizen volunteer sewing project, a CD-ROM and an Internet Web site.
Volunteers said the project has gotten delightfully out of hand to the benefit of local children. It reminds former one-room school teacher Margaret Staley Hanson of the good, old days when teaching children was a community focus.
"I started out in a one-room school house in Green County near Monticello at Ventner School around 1943,'' said Hanson, 77.
For three years, she taught 15 children spanning the first through eighth grades alone in the Ventner school, which had been built lovingly by local families just beyond the old Oregon district.
"We didn't even have a telephone in the school, so if we needed anything I had to send one of the children to a nearby house to use the phone,'' Hanson said. "It wasn't easy, but it was fun because the kids were so nice. I loved it.''
When she met and married Owen Hanson, she moved to Oregon and transferred to a one-room school in Brooklyn. By the late 1940s, she had worked up to the town of Dunn's bustling two-room Oakside School. When the district consolidated its schools in the 1960s, Hanson settled into teaching third grade.
Hanson has since retired in Oregon. But Manson still remembers being a student in Hanson's Oakside seventh- and eighth-grade classes.
"We didn't have any technology, and phys-ed was recess,'' Manson said. "I remember it being difficult for the teacher because in an hour's time she'd have eight math groups.''
Most students were stair-step siblings from the immediate farm neighborhood and the school operated like family, with older children helping younger ones.
"Whenever someone moved in, it was quite an event,'' Manson said. Christmas also was special because Oakside hosted its annual pageant on the stage at Dunn Town Hall and everybody came.
Children's education was always important in the district, even in its early days, said Florice Paulson, who is compiling the history of the Oregon School District from 1846 to the present. Paulson, an Oregon native and member of its historical society, plans to publish it in book form in April.
"One of the first things settlers did when they came here was to build a school and a church. . . . School was very important to them,'' Paulson said.
The country schools were a common topic in Paulson's extended family, although she didn't attend a one-roomer.
"I was a town kid,'' said Paulson, 80. "I've been hearing about what the schools were like all of my life. But it's an awful job to find the dates and records. Some of the remembrances are pretty hard to find, too.''
Project coordinator Philip Peterson, 62, said local historians want to preserve the community's school history before his generation disappears.
A few of the old sites still have schools on them, but many are gone.
"The sesquicentennial was a chance for us to gather the information for this book,'' Peterson said. "We have pictures of people who went to these schools. We have them sitting in the classroom in the '40s before consolidation. This is the end of an era.''
TO HELP: The Oregon Area Historical Society welcomes donations, photos, remembrances and artifacts for the "Making History Come Alive: From Immigrants to Internet'' project. Contact Philip Peterson at (608) 835-3768 or the society at (608) 835-8961, or by mail at 159 W. Lincoln St., Oregon, Wis., 53575. Copies of the history book will also be available through the society. For now, you can see what's done so far on the school district's Web site at www.oregon.k12.wi.us. The pages should be complete in early April, said Mike Way, technology director.
Posted May 15, 1998
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