One-room schools being restored to save Washington, Greene counties’ past
A former one-room schoolhouse sits alongside a quiet country road in East Finley Township with a tilting bell tower, broken windows and a fragile slate roof.
Once known as the Stony Point Schoolhouse, the frame structure today is used as a hay barn along East Finley Drive, said township secretary Melissa Metz, who was among those who worked to save another beloved one-room school from coal mine subsidence.
“We used to have nine of them,” said Metz, while giving a tour of the restored Jordan Schoolhouse, a jewel in the township park at 700 Templeton Run Road.
“This was the last one that wasn’t falling down. The rest are decrepit or gone.”
There were once hundreds of one-room schools across Washington and Greene counties when every municipality was a school district until the state forced them to merge in the 1960s.
It’s difficult to say how many of them remain standing because a lot of them have been hidden behind building additions and turned into residences or used for other purposes, Mon Valley historian Terry Necciai said.
The Jordan building had been purchased by Consol, a Southpointe-based coal operator that agreed to donate it to the township, which relocated it to the park in 2005 using local tax dollars and a $25,000 state grant. The roof was lifted off and the building cut into two pieces before a crane lifted it onto a flatbed truck where it once stood at the Bedillion Farm and moved it about a mile down the road for reassembly at its current location.
The building has since been used for many weddings, and each May, McGuffey School District buses all of its second-graders to the schoolhouse for the day for a history lesson on how students once attended one-room schools and had to use an outhouse when nature called.
“It’s cute as a button,” Metz said, referring to how the children react to having classes in the schoolhouse.
“They sit there so quiet,” she said. “They are so disciplined.”
These schools typically housed students until after they completed the eighth grade. Students were given duties that included hauling firewood to school to fire up the potbelly stove or carrying water for washing hands and the blackboard, according to Washington County History and Landmarks Foundation. The teacher also brought out a hickory stick to spank children who misbehaved or used a wooden ruler to rap their knuckles.
“The three Rs, that’s all it was,” said Dean Phillippi Sr., who attended up to the fourth grade in a one-room schoolhouse in Canton Township near Washington’s West End. The “three Rs” refer to the nickname given to the studies of reading, writing and arithmetic.
The teacher at Scottsdale School at Scott and McGovern avenues in Canton started the day giving lessons to the first-graders before handing them an assignment and moving on to the next grade,” said Phillippi, who now lives in Jacksonville, Fla.
“Then, we took naps,” he said.
He reached out recently to the county landmarks foundation hoping to get a historic plaque for his old school, but it since has been altered too much to qualify for the distinction, foundation coordinator Sandy Mansmann said.
“That’s kind of a shame,” Phillippi said.
Mansmann said the schoolhouses are known for having their front doors on a gable side of their buildings, likely to prevent someone entering the building late from interrupting the teacher.
Meanwhile, the 108-year-old Crouse Schoolhouse in Greene County reopened to the public in August for the first time in 55 years after the brick building was restored by the county’s historical society.
Buzz Walters, who was instrumental in restoring the Crouse building along Route 21 near Rogersville, said there were once 92 schoolhouses in the West Greene area, although not all of them were used at the same time.
“We were so spread out in the 1830s, so how do you get public education to the kids?” Walters said. “You need a schoolhouse that everyone can walk to.”
After most of the renovations on the Crouse School were completed over this past summer, organizers held an open house and impromptu classroom session to celebrate the progress made to keep the historic schoolhouse from becoming, well, history.
“It was a part of history that was going to be gone,” Walters said. “Once these schoolhouses are gone, so is their history.”
In the Mon Valley, Rostraver Township is home to a rare stone schoolhouse dating to 1830 on Municipal Drive near Cedar Creek Park.
The Old Concord Schoolhouse, with plastered interior walls and a corner fireplace, is owned by Westmoreland County and operated by the Rostraver Township Historical Society, which opens it to the public on Sundays during the summer.
The benches were constructed so tall that the younger children’s feet didn’t touch the floor while they were seated, society member Elaine Phillips said.
“This is a storefront for our historical society,” said its president, Frank Indoff, who hopes to bring more programs to the schoolhouse this year.
Regional editor Mike Jones contributed to this report.