Hanchett School Reunion

Reunion 2011.

 

Rural Schoolhouses

This article appeared in

The Holland Sentinel’s Week End Magazine

Saturday, March 24, 1984

Rural schoolhouses were a livelihood for Helen Hanchett, a Coopersville resident who is now nearing 80, Hanchett remembers walking in the early morning hours to the one-room school houses where she began teaching in 1923.  She would pile wood into the cold furnace and start it up, and then tug the belltower rope to ring in a new school day.  Nine grades of students had the next half an hour to stop their school yard games of ball or sledding, hang up their coats and dinner pails, and settle behind their assigned wooden desks.

 

Hanchett taught in six different one-room schools and two larger buildings before she retired in 1966, and her husband Lyle both attended and taught in country schools before he became a superintendent elsewhere in the state.  The building once known as Hanchett School, where Helen briefly taught and which Lyle attended, still stands next door to the Hanchett’s home.

 

In 1959, the Coopersville District closed the school at 16760 88th Street, which was named for Lyle’s grandfather, who donated the original farm land for it.  The Hanchetts bought it to renovate and Sell in 1961 as a modern residence.  Now it is the home of Maxine and George Whipple.  Only memories of the old building and the years spent inside it remain.

 

Country school houses are a source of varied memories and uses for many West Michigan residents.  Anyone who attended elementary school before the late 1950s had a good chance of having studied in one.  Until that time most school districts in Michigan had consisted of only one school, no matter how small.  But in 1964, districts were consolidated by state mandate, bringing the more than 1,000 districts at that time down to a more manageable 570.  (In the mid 1800s there were almost 4,000 Michigan districts.)  Consolidated districts found the old schoolhouses unnecessary and often in ill repair, and quickly closed and sold many of them off.

 

Past students and teachers at the country schools often wonder what has become of their old familiar buildings.  Most have been torn down since the 1960s.  Some still stand without repair.  But a lucky few have been adapted for modern uses.  The old buildings have a romance and sturdy build that lead many to seek them out as homes, churches and businesses.

 

Rural schools built in the mid 1800s were either log or wooden, and had a terrible reputation for being incapable of keeping out the elements.  They were intolerably hot and unsanitary in the summer, and children clustered around the stove in the wintertime.  Often located on low, unfarmable land, some schools flooded from time to time, surrounding the students with insects or frozen surfaces.  And to divert pigs from wandering into the classrooms and eating children's’ lunches, a bucket of corn was kept filled outside the door.

 

Either the teacher or a paid janitor lit the stove and stoked its fire.  Hanchett was paid 25 cents a day when he was an older student to run next door and warm up the school before his breakfast, he says.  Janitors hired at the Borculo school in 1887 were paid four cents a day.

 

School bells were often taken from steamer ships, when steam whistles replaced the old brass.  Available in a range of sizes, the bells were mounted on wheels and hung high above the school in their own shingled towers.  The pullcord hung through a hole in the roof and into the school entranceway.  Unfortunately, water and cold weather could make their way through the hole as well, weakening the building over time.

 

In a one room school, children from 5 or 6 years old to age 14 had one teacher.  After morning prayers and a Bible story, she would begin calling up each grade, a group of five to 10 children, to gather around her desk at the front of the room and hear a 20 minute lesson,  She proceeded to cycle through the age groups, covering the four or more subjects they needed to know to pass the eighth grade exam and graduate, at age 14.

 

Children not receiving instruction were on their honor to study, read, or draw pictures quietly at their desks.  Past country school students contend that discipline was seldom a problem.  The older children helped oversee the younger ones and the teachers were good organizers, seating the misbehaved students in the front row.  Parents sided with teachers over students when they misbehaved, so children knew that a licking at school would only lead to a more severe one at home.

 

The children and their families composed a close knit social circle, extending no further than their respective churches.  Before automobiles brought communities together, high school was often a child’s first opportunity to meet peers who lived further from their homes than two miles.  Competitive sports, namely boys’ track or baseball, also offered this opportunity in springtime, but only to schools with enrollments big enough to form a team.

 

The favorite schoolyard game of the 1920s and 30s was “pom-pom pullaway,” described as a cross between “capture the flag” and tag.  Swings, a merry-go-round and a slide were installed at Westview School while Sternberg attended it in the ‘30s, he says.  The new owners say that the paths of these games, stripes from the swings and a circle from around the merry go round, were still visible when they took over four years after the school closed.

 

“They didn’t close school for stormy weather,” says Helen Hanchett.  Commuting to high school was such a chore for some rural kids that they boarded in town during the week.  Or if they had the money, they rode an interurban electrified street car into town, and walked from the nearest stop to their school.

 

“Snow didn’t bother kids in those days,” says Lyle Hanchett.  Before there were autos, kids walked the two miles or less to school on wintery days bundled up in long underwear, wool knit stockings, leggings buttoned to the knee, shoes and rubber overshoes, sweaters, coats, mittens and hats.  Helen recalls once getting a ride from her father in his hose-drawn sleigh, and having had so much fun jumping off of it and running alongside that her father decided to let her walk the whole way.

 

In the 1800s, classes took place irregularly during the year, as farming seasons required the stronger children to work on their farms.  A nine or ten month schedule became standard in most areas in the 1890s and day lengths gradually became standardized as well.

 

Wood and coal burning stoves were gradually replaced with oil furnaces in the 1940s and 50s.  Whipple still uses this furnace to heat his basement.  Major restoration and additions were needed in later years, as buildings aged and communities grew.

 

The only thing existing schoolhouses have in common these days is their visitors.  Students, teachers and neighbors of the old schools continually want to bring their friends and relatives by to show off the familiar building and contrast its present use with their memories of the past.

 

George Whipple, the resident and owner of what was Hanchett school until 1961, says people still come by and want to tour his home after living there for over eight years.  The home barely resembles the old school.  White aluminum siding insulates the outer wooden walls, negating the need for extensive sanding and painting, and hiding the location of the original front door.  The building was moved about 15 feet back on the lot and rotated clockwise, over a basement.

 

Its 20-food height is really the only original aspect now, and even this is not made use of.,  The ceilings were lowered to eight feet during renovation, leaving a two-foot crawlspace under a spacious, empty attic.  All of the oversized windows were replaced with tiny modern ones, and a modern furnace replaced the fuel oil burner, now in the basement.

 

Even the bell tower was removed, and the original bell relegated to a steel pole behind the house.  Visitors like to walk around Whipple’s home to see the bell, and get a view of the chicken coop, Bagel the Beagle’s dog house, and the plush lawn that have replaced their remembered schoolyard.

 

The “back woodsiness” of the country schools was a source of embarrassment for some, but not the kids at the Hanchett school.  Lyle recalls that, when he was a student, if anybody asked how many attended his school, his friends would reply with pride “three Hunderd and 35.”  There were three children by the lat name of Hundered, he said, and the rest of the school made up the difference.

 

“Hunderd sounded the same as hundred if you said it fast,” he says.