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Remembering a school
Celebrating a two-room schoolhouse in Sumerduck
Date published: 4/30/2007 By Flowers Umble BY AMY FLOWERS UMBLE At the two-room schoolhouse in Sumerduck, elementary school students carried in wood to heat the building, brought buckets of water to wash their hands and used outhouses for bathroom breaks. "It was rough going," said William Eugene Smith, who attended the school in 1925-27, "what with the wood stoves, and going outside to go to the bathroom, and I had to walk 2 miles to school, carrying my lunch pail." Yesterday, students who attended the school before it closed in 1959 met at the Fauquier County school to catch up and reminisce about the old days. When students misbehaved, they didn't get sent to the principal's office--a luxury missing in a school where five grades shared a room and a teacher. The kids got rapped on the knuckles with a ruler. There were no jungle gyms or monkey bars for recess--just a chinning bar on the porch and some baseball equipment for a game in the rocky field behind the school. One of the school's two rooms was used as a classroom for grades one through five, the other used as a stage for plays, a recess area on rainy days and a place where the teacher could introduce new material separately to each grade. Audrey Comer Grove loved the idea of a reunion. She wanted to chat with others who knew what it was like to go to the Sumerduck Schoolhouse. Most other people are surprised by her stories of five grades in a single room, she said. "They can't believe you actually held classes and that you learned," Grove said. "They think it was great confusion, but they had more order than they do in the classrooms today." Grove was excited to run into old classmates, some she hadn't seen in decades. She toured the old school--now an antiques store--with Willa June Smith Shirey. The pair swapped stories and marvelled over an old picture as they looked around the building. Shirey remembered leaving Sumerduck halfway through fifth grade, when her family moved to Arlington. Patrick Henry High School seemed like another world. "You sure must have felt like a country girl," Grove laughed. "Oh, I did," Shirey said. She went from two rooms to several, from outhouses to indoor bathrooms. "And we did things at recess other than make moss gardens," she said.
Date published: 4/30/2007
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