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The District Schoolhouse Of Horse & Buggy Era
John van Schaick, Jr. |
Excerpted from “A Boyhood of the Horse and Buggy Age” in the Christian Leader, March 16, 1940. The Rev. Dr. van Schaick, a Cobleskill native, was decorated by King Albert of Belgium for relief work during World War I, was an 18-year pastor of the First Universalist Church of Washington, and served as president of the District of Columbia Board of Education before being named editor of the Universalist Church’s weekly newspaper Christian Leader in 1922. He taught in one-room schools at Patria and Mineral Springs before entering the ministry and wrote several books as well a many articles, including one for the January, 1942 HISTORICAL REVIEW. He died in 1949. The article is reprinted with permission of the Unitarian Universalist Association, successor to the Universalist Church. |
IT was a mild, melting April morning in 1890 that I was taken seven miles into the hills south of Cobleskill by a horse and buggy driven, if I remember correctly, by myself, with a younger brother to take old Bill home.
I was sixteen and had graduated from the Cobleskill Union Free School and Academy, as it was then called, the June before and had been taking post-graduate work since. My easy-going philosophical and humorous father, a lawyer, had seen Sile Nobles, a client, on the main street of our village and fixed it up for “John Junior” to have the Spring term of the school on Petersburg Hill, or Patria as it had been renamed. I received a wage of $4.50 a week, which doubtless was regarded as more than I was likely to be worth. My trustee contracted for my “keep” from Monday to Friday for $1.50, afterward raised to $1.75 as a result of some dickering of which I, personally, was unconscious.
My first morning was peaceful. The “young giants” helped me kindle a fire with birch bark in the wood stove, and one of them swept out the dirt. I called the school to order promptly at nine, read a passage of scripture and led in the Lord’s Prayer, and then took the names for the register which the state education department provided. I proceeded with confidence born of careful reading of Page’s “Theory and Practice of Teaching” and memory of what my own teachers had done. I always had been in a graded school, but had heard much about district schools from my father, who had attended the Sharon Hill school under old “Squire Knight,” a great tradition in our county, and who also had been school commissioner for six years in charge of rural schools when he was starting out as a lawyer. So I had it in me “not to be thrown out” and “to get well acquainted in my district.” Doubtless my teaching left much to be desired, but there never was any lack of confidence on the part of the village boy who had “shot up like a weed.” Confidence is half the battle in almost anything provided it does not degenerate in to the over-confidence which comes from vanity and egotism.
I am inclined to say that rural schools do some things for pupils that more modern schools find it hard to equal. Perhaps I am giving credit to the school for what is due to country life as a whole, but somewhere in the system there came to the pupils, at least as clearly as in any better school, the idea that learning was highly valuable and important and that what they got depended on themselves. There was of course in the rural school a closer association with the teacher than is possible in village and city schools, which was all to the good if the teacher had personality and all to the bad if he or she was an indifferent or weak time server.
Though it was rapidly dying out there was still left in the rural community, in my day, something of that general interest in catch problems, spelling bees, mental arithmetic, which a child absorbed and which gave him the notion that schooling was more than incarceration with a taskmaster from nine to four.
ALL through that spring of 1890 I was up betimes on Mondays, driving along our valley a mile and a half to Mineral Springs and then starting straight up the Greenbush Hill to the south. Once on top, there remained about three miles up and down around the east shoulder of the Petersburg Mountain. Usually I walked part way to let my brother get back by school time. Once or twice I made the whole distance on foot, going straight up Donats Mountain south of our village and then taking the Tarpent, an old Indian trail, along the top of what the farmers called “the hogback.” Those were lovely walks. And as I came to know the children better, they were watching for me and coming to meet me. I went sometimes to supper and to spend the night with children who might live two miles away. One of these homes was over the ridge and on the steep descent down into the beautiful Schoharie Valley. I remember the far views off to the higher Catskills on that walk, but more clearly the fact that for the first time in my life I was requested to “ask the blessing” at table. It was totally unexpected. I was used to having a minister “ask the blessing,” but I was not familiar with the old New York state tradition which called the school teacher “the dominie.” Well, I did it, but I never could have done it if I had not remembered both Grandfather van Schaick and Grandfather Shaver. At our own home table our contact with blessings was limited and somewhat marred by choked back laughter when one old man who came to see us, stone deaf, unable to hear himself, let out a yell in his blessing and then subsided to a whisper. Our parents at those times may have been trying to pray, but all that we saw were fierce glances in our direction.
IN the fall of 1890 and through to June, 1891, I had the school at Mineral Springs, near enough to walk back and forth every day. During that school year, 1 reached my seventeenth birthday and felt like a veteran. The school was larger and the terms longer, so that I had thirty-six weeks of work at $9.00 a week. I liked teaching, but I had no idea of becoming a teacher. At that period of my life it was law and politics that I was looking forward to after college. As for the ministry, I could not bear to think of myself separated from my fellows by a black coat, white tie and the title “Reverend.” How little we can tell what is coming or tell what the things that we are doing are doing to us. Getting up school exhibitions, training children to speak, enlisting the interest of parents, having a kind of pastoral care over my flock, perhaps were unconsciously “conditioning” me for my life work. It was not doubt that kept me away from the ministry for a time. It was a wrong idea about the professionalism of the office. And I have to confess that it was not a love of teaching that made me a teacher before college and sent me back into it for three years after my college course. It was need of money. But I did love the work.
I could have been happy serving as a teacher all my life. The little red schoolhouse taught me that.
Over at Mineral Springs they still tell of the time when their teacher came near being swept away by the Cobleskill Creek when it was in flood.
Instead of crossing the creek on the South Grand Street bridge in the village, I tried to cross at the lower red bridge where the stream had overflowed its banks. The main current was a fearful looking sight that morning, but I did not think that the water was deep on the flats across the stream and so pushed ahead. The current, however, was strong enough to sweep me off my feet and I saved myself by grasping a bush and climbing on to a little island before I struck the main stream. There I stood until David B. Lawyer appeared with his sleigh and team. I called to him that I would cross back to him but he fiercely gestured to stay where I was. Then he turned, backed his horses until the end of the sleigh floated over to me and I was able to jump in. Under full head of steam I made my way home, changed clothing and walked the two miles to my school, the other way—arriving about ten a. m. Unlike college classes when the professor is late, my school had not dispersed. They were not astonished or excited by the incident as city children would have been. It was a part of the scheme of things to them. And the way in which we all learned to “take it as it comes” and to do our best was a part of our education I should have hated to miss.