I have been reading some of the personal history that my mother wrote in 1987. The
paragraphs below tell of her grade school days in Clay and Putnam County, Indiana. I
would love any comments about Indiana area schools in that time period. I wonder what
the school term was then? Thank you.
Mary Lou
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Later we moved to the Stark place where I started to school. We probably moved there in
the spring of 1923. The house we moved to was a nice big white house with a big front
porch. There was a nice apple orchard. The house had an upstairs. One room upstairs had
toys stored in it, left there from the people who owned it. I liked to go up there and
look around. Once we had a storm while living there, then afterwards Alma, Jessie and I
went out to the orchard and walked up and down the rows between the trees to see if we
could find any bird eggs and baby birds that had gotten blown out of the trees by the wind
and rain. There were two young ladies by the name of Sophia and Christine Stark who lived
on south of us. They were probably children of the people who owned our house. These girls
would go by our house every morning and evening on their way to work. At least one of them
was a teacher. They always waved at us if we were standing at our front room
window. We made it our business to be there waiting for them to come by so we could wave
to them, too. One of them bought a new red car which we liked very much. Then we wanted
and dreamed of a new red car. So our dad took some old wheels, one for each of us and
wired it to a stick so we could push the wheel around and act like it was our car. We had
a lot of fun with that.
I started to school there from the Stark house in the fall of 1923. The school was called
the Friendly Grove School. It was south of our house about one half or three quarters of a
mile. We had to walk as there were no school busses to haul us. If the weather w (Clay
County, IN) as too bad, some one took us. Some of the children who went to the Friendly
Grove School were: Verta West, Anna Straliah, Amanda Burns and Orainia Burns; Delma, Della
and Belma Clark and their brothers Ray and Don Clark. Also, Orville Barley, Gynath
Harbaugh and Charles Major. Jesse Liston was my first teacher. He looked like Abraham
Lincoln, we thought. If we wanted him to do something for us, he would say, “Well, you
will have to tie a string around my finger so I won’t forget”. Jessie and Alma went to
school there, too. I remember sometimes I would get sick and want to go home and Alma
would walk me home. We went to church some there, too, to a little church called
Friendly Grove Church. We went once and took a pitch in dinner for a picnic, I remember.
When we moved from the Stark house we moved to the Howald farm at Prairie City, IN in the
spring of 1925. This was a nice house too. We had one room we called the parlor, which we
did not use much. Then there was another one we called the living room and we always used
it. We had a nice big barn lot. We had 2 big trees where our dad had put up a big pole
between the two trees and put up a log chain swing for us to swing on. We had a wooden
seat to put in it. I have a picture of Jessie and I sitting in it. (MLH has this picture.)
We went to the Prairie City School and we had to walk there, too or else be taken. If it
was rainy or too cold to walk Ernest (Mom's youngest brother)used to drive us to
school in the surrey. It had two seats but no top and he sometimes drove two mules, Bob
and Dolly or two horses, Maude and Daisy. Some of the children we were in school with were
Christine Emmert and her brothers and sisters. They lived right up the road from us.
These were Charley and Martin Howald, Arthur Alsip, Velma Vivian Wright. Teachers at this
school were: Tracie Short and part time teacher was Maxine Kirchner. Sometimes we had to
carry water from Emmert’s well. I don’t remember if it was for the stock to drink but I
think it was.
When we walked to school from our house, the boys were so mean. They chased us and threw
rocks at us. From Prairie City, we moved back to Putnam County, IN into Uncle Mode’s
house, where I was born. I was in the third grade of school when we moved there. My
teacher was Laura McCullough. Jessie and I finished elementary school there at No. 10
School and then graduated from High School at Reelsville, IN. Jessie graduated in 1932 and
I graduated in 1935.
When I was in the fourth grade my teacher was Maggie Donald. Then I had Fred Harris
through fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grades. I was in the “big room” we called it. You
see it was a 2 room school. The little room was for the first four grades and the big room
for the last four grades. Then I was in High School at Reelsville, IN. I started there in
the fall of 1931 through April of 1932. I graduated from Reelsville High School in April
of 1935.