Class photo in front of Free Union School, 1900-1901		The school circa 1917		As a house in the 1950s

One-Room School History Project
Winter/Spring 2006

The New Jersey Historical Society, based in Newark, NJ, has an educational program called "Adopt-a-School," which is an in-depth project for selected classrooms and their teachers. This spring we are participating in the first homeschool group to do such a project, along with three other homeschooling families.

One of those families lives in a house in Great Meadows, New Jersey, that was once a one-room school. Free Union School operated from 1835 to 1945, with up to 40 students at a time in kindergarten through eighth grades. Our group project is to research the history of the school and create an exhibit for the New Jersey Historical Society, which will be on display for one year, starting in May 2006.

Our family's part of the project is to research the school building and create a model of it for the exhibit.

OUR MODEL

We decided to create a model of the school as it existed in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Most of what we learned was from oral histories of people who attended the school as kids, from kindergarten or first grade through eighth grade.

(Click camera icon to see images of finished model)

Documentation that accompanies the model in the exhibit (17 pages, pdf, 5.5MB)

CREATING THE MODEL

• Preliminary model — made of cardboard and painted with the paint we'll use on the final version. (See images)
• Creating the floor — Home Depot cut a sheet of 1/4-in. plywood to size. Then we drew lines to show individual boards, stained, and finished the board to make a floor. (See images)
• Making some of the furnishings — we are using "dollhouse miniature" furniture to furnish the schoolhouse. Some of it needed to be assembled, like this treadle sewing machine. (See images)
• Making the stone base of the school building — we took a photo of a stone wall near our house and printed a piece of it many times, cut those out, and glued them to the side of a frame made of 1x2 pine boards. Then covered that with clear contact paper. The schoolhouse model (so far it's just a floor) will sit on top of that base, as the original schoolhouse did. (See images)
• Building the walls and roof — we got some help on cutting and building the frame from one of the dads in our project. The frame is made of 1/4-inch plywood, with clapboard siding glued to that.
  (See images)
• Cutting the slate tiles — slate began to be commonly used for roofs in this area in the mid-19th century, so the school's slate roof was probably not original in 1835. However, it was still there in the 1950s (it has since been replaced), so we cut slate tiles, 1 inch x 2 inches, out of tiles that were on an old barn in the Great Meadows area. (See images)
• Painting the windows and doors. (See images)
• Painting the building — both inside and out. (See images)
• Building the slate roof. (See images)
• Finishing and furnishing the model. (See images)

BOOKS WE HAVE READ

• The One-Room School at Squabble Hollow, by Rosmarie Hausherr
• Going to School During the Civil War: The Union, by Kerry A. Graves
• One-Room School, by Laurence Pringle
• Chickaree in the Wall: A history of one-room schools in Ocean County, NJ, by Carolyn M. Cambell et al
• One-Room Country Schools: History and Recollections, by Jerry Apps
• The One-room Schoolhouse, by Paul Rocheleau

WEB SITES WE HAVE VISITED

• Blackwell History of Education Collection: One-Room School - lots of great photos, lesson plans from 1900s and 1930s, etc.
• Purdy School - one-room school museum in Illinois
• Red Mill Museum Village - one-room school museum in northern NJ

Another historical one-room school we visited at a living history museum