For any child in modern America, the school years define life. But can you imagine having less than ten classmates in your grade? During the 1930s, children in Everett attended a one-room school house, with one teacher teaching eight grade levels. Like most buildings in the village, the schoolhouse lacked electricity, phones, and indoor plumbing. Rain or shine, snow or sleet, students walked up the hill from their homes to their classes. The Everett school later closed and merged with a larger school in Peninsula, and the building became a private residence.
Typical day at school, the teacher would come out to the front and ring her bell, and we would start having classes. And she’d have first grade reading, and then she’d have second grade something else, and third grade something else, and fourth grade math, and keep going up the line and we had classes all day. But we learned. We learned how to read, we learned how to multiply, we learned how to divide. And we thought maybe we didn’t know as much as we should, but when we went to Peninsula, we kept up with ‘em.
One-Room School House
Marjorie Osborne Morgan, who grew up in Everett during the 1930s, describes the Everett schoolhouse and the numbers of students her teacher taught.
First of all, of course we had to walk to school, rain or shine. And it was just one, one big room, and then it had rows of desks. And we start over here: First, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth. Would carry your lunch. There was a well and they’d go out with a bucket and dip down in the well, and there was always just a dipper in the bucket. And one of my friends was tellin’ us the other day, she says, “You know, I started carrying my own water. I didn’t like that everybody have that dipper in that water.” And I said, “That’s one of the hazards, I guess.” And she would teach the first and second grade together, and then maybe the third and fourth, fifth and sixth, then seventh and eighth grade. But there might be only three or four children in each grade, so at the most, at the most I think there was, maybe, probably eighteen or nineteen.
