A number of attendees at the Resource Bank grand opening in Hampshire this weekend remembered when they spent time inside a one-room school house.
As he toured the former 1859 Eakin school house that is now a community room and attached to the bank, Hampshire resident Howard Hoffman said he attended the one-room Burlington Griggs School.
“I transferred while I was in the fourth grade to Plato School during the mid-1940s,” Howard said.
Howard’s wife, Bernice, said she attended a one-room school in Harmony, Illinois. She said she was one of the two eighth grade graduates of that school in 1951.
More Top Picks Night Mode Vs Blue Light Filter Whats The Difference
“This school house takes me back,” said Hampshire resident Dale Dopkins, current member and former commander of Hampshire-Burlington American Legion Post 680. “I grew up in River Falls, Wisconsin. I lived on a farm and went to a one-room school for first through eighth grade students. There were 25 students in my school. My education there was better than what the kids in town received.”
“My mother, Elizabeth Petrie Dopkins, was a one-room school house teacher,” Dopkins added. “She was the teacher, principal and custodian all in one. She started teaching when she was 16 years old. Some of the farm boys she taught were older than her. She boarded with a family that lived one mile from the school house. She was cautioned to walk home with the students because there were wolves in the area. One night in the dead of winter, she stayed late at school and had to walk alone on a path through the woods. She heard a rustling among the trees that could have been made by wolves. She made it to the farmhouse safely.”
Hampshire resident Phil Manning was once a student in the red brick Standard School. After the Eakin school house was moved to the south side of Big Timber Road in Rutland Township, Standard School was built in its place in 1931.
“The Eakin school house was turned into a polling place when I was 21 years old,” Manning said. “It was the first place I voted.”
Sycamore resident Charles Rogers said his first teaching assignment through the United States Department of the Interior was in a one-room school house located in a little village 100 miles east of Nome, Alaska.
“I received the assignment during my first year out of college,” Rogers said. “I taught there for one year and then taught at a boarding school for one year. I taught for four years on an Apache reservation in New Mexico. I also worked as a principal for four years at a boarding school on a Navajo reservation in Arizona.”
The final years of his teaching career were spent in Illinois.
“I moved to Mendota,” Rogers said. “I taught for 27 years in Earlville before I retired.”
Denise Moran is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.