Humboldt County Historical Society
Children from our One-Room Schools, Blocksburg, Fort Seward, Dobbyn's Creek, 1880-1955
Beautifully conceived and presented by the Blocksburg Town Hall Association, this fine book gathers the recollections of former pupils of the one-room schools around Blocksburg. Thirty-two contributors - Murphys, Swans, Frasers, Ripples and Burgesses, just to name a few - recall their school days with marvelous clarity and detail. There is the framed photo of George Washington, whose eyes followed the children around the schoolroom, and who therefore must have enjoyed such sights as Art Hardy scooting around in his seat and igniting a box of matches in his back pocket. There are lunches brought in buckets and lard pails, games of ante over, and a new young teacher in her first job who runs out to climb trees with her charges during recess. And what did a teacher have to know to get a teaching certificate in those days? An 1889 teachers' test, striking in its rigor and breadth, is provided, which readers may try matching wits against, as well as an 1893 teacher's diary.
The trips themselves to and from school are thrilling: crossing the Eel River on a temporary catwalk in order to get home for Christmas; being swept down Dobbyn's Creek on horseback during a storm; and singing loudly to discourage unwanted anmials while walking the narrow country roads. June Reger, nee Muir, writes eloquently about four generations of her family, including her grandfather, Thomas Murphy. When she was just six years old, he gave her his smart old bear-hunting horse and taught her to ride so she could get to school, where she soon discovered his name carved into one of the desks.
While the school experience is the common thread that runs through these stories, the larger arc of each life is also felt. The reader comes to know and appreciate each contributor, and is delighted when they appear, as they often do, in each other's stories. Inspired and well-equipped for life by their early experiences, the contributors to this book emerge into successful lives that take them all over the country and the world, and very often back again to the soruce of these rich memories.