Monthly Archives: February 2017

Information, Status

CONSOLIDATION OF ILLINOIS SCHOOLS

Leave a comment

School

One-room schoolhouses, first established in 1818 in Illinois, had been immensely successful. Since students attended schools within two miles of their homes, they and their parents developed a sense of community. Since the one-room schoolhouses had a low pupil to teacher ratio, the students received individual attention. Hearing subject matter repeated was actually beneficial. According to Illinois School History, Illinois had more than 10,000 one-room schoolhouses having an average enrollment of 12 students by 1942. Over 120,000 students were enrolled in one-room schools.

Radical changes were on the horizon. A combination of factors led to the consolidation of schools and the demise of one-room schoolhouses. A slow but steady decline in the rural population was occurring. There were fewer school-age children living in the country. The number of “hard” roads which could accommodate school buses was increasing. Consolidation held out the promise of greater efficiency.

In 1951 the mass consolidation of school districts began. For many rural children, this meant riding the school bus for an hour or more each school day to get to school. If a child was one of the first to be picked up in the morning, he got on the bus at 7:15 A.M. The bus traveled rural country roads to pick up the children on the route. If there were no problems on the route, the bus arrived at school at 8:30 A.M.

After school, the bus took the same route. The first child off the bus arrived home before 4:00 P.M. The others were not so lucky. The last child off the bus often did not arrive home before 5:30 P.M.

When the mass consolidation of school districts began, some of the rural children were sent to schools in large towns with populations of 5,500 or more. In other cases, children attended grade school in tiny communities which happened to have a building which had served as an academy or private school. Rosamond, Illinois is an example.

Rosamond is located in east-central Illinois about 40 miles southeast of Springfield. Children in the surrounding area attended one-room schoolhouses. In the late 1880’s, Rosamond High School was built. It was a fine brick building with individual classrooms with built-in coat closets, a large study hall, gymnasium, stage, kitchen, and playgrounds. As a part of school consolidation, Rosamond High School was converted into Rosamond Grade School, and the high school students were transferred to Pana High School.

Since the mass consolidation of school districts in Illinois in 1951, further consolidations have occurred. Almost seventy years after the first mass school consolidation began, consolidation remains a concern for rural and small districts in Illinois.

—By Karen Centowski

Information, News

THE ONE-ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE  

Leave a comment

Books

When Illinois became a state in 1818, Northern Illinois was still a wilderness.  Only a handful of settlers lived around the area which is now Chicago.  Kaskaskia, which had 7,000 residents, became the state capitol.

In 1818 the new state legislature passed a law stating that “the section numbered 16 of every township, and when such section has been sold, shall be granted to the State for use of the inhabitants of such townships for the use of schools.” As a result, one-room schoolhouses began to appear.  Since the state legislature had not appropriated money to pay to operate schools, many of these first schools were charter schools.  Some schools were subscription based, with neighboring families paying for an itinerant schoolmaster.

A huge change occurred in 1855.  The state legislature passed the free school law which gave townships the ability to establish school districts with elected board, which in turn had the power to levy taxes.  The number of one room schools increased substantially.  The schoolhouses were placed within each county so that no family would be more than two miles from a school.  Children aged five to eighteen walked to school, rode horses, or came to school by horse and buggy.

In 1857 Illinois State Normal University was founded to prepare individuals to teach.  According to the article “Earliest Educators” in the February, 2014 issue of Illinois State, “For the first four decades, the only curriculum offered was a fundamental teacher preparation sequence that required three years to complete.  After 1900, a two-year degree was added, which was sufficient for those planning to teach in rural schools.”  At that time the number of one-room schools in Illinois had grown to 10,000.

Teaching in a one-room schoolhouse was a challenge.  The schoolhouses were placed within each county so that no family would be more than two miles from a school.  The teacher had to arrive at the schoolhouse at 7:00 A.M.  The first task was to start the fire in the stove by using corn cobs and scraps of paper.  Then the teacher added chunks of coal.  The floor had to be swept in the morning and often a second time in the afternoon.  Blackboards had to be washed.  Windows had to be washed.  Pails of water needed to be brought from the well for the students and teacher to use to wash their hands.  In the winter, the sidewalks had to be shoveled.

Classes began at 9:00 A.M. and ended at 4:00 P.M.  The teacher taught grades one through eight.  In addition, the teacher supervised and often participated in recess.  In the evening, the teacher had to grade papers and prepare the lesson plans and worksheets for the next day.

Interestingly enough, discipline was not a problem.  “Good discipline was assumed to be the chief order of the day by children and parents, as well as by the teacher,” recalled former teacher Roy Schilling in an interview for “Earliest Educators.”

1872 RULES FOR TEACHERS

  1. Teachers each day will fill lamps, clean chimneys.
  2. Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day’s session.
  3. Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nibs to the individual taste of the pupils.
  4. Men teachers may take one evening a week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly.
  5. After ten hours in school, teachers may spend the remaining time reading the Bible or other good books.
  6. Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.
  7. Every teacher should lay aside from each day’s pay a goodly sum of his earnings for his benefit during his declining years so that he will not become a burden on society.
  8. Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect his worth, intention, integrity and honesty.
  9. The teacher who performs his labor faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of twenty-five cents per week in his pay, providing the Board of Education approves.

1915 RULES FOR TEACHERS

  1. You will not marry during the term of your contract.
  2. You are not to keep company with men.
  3. You must be home between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. unless attending a school function.
  4. You may not loiter downtown in ice cream stores.
  5. You may not travel beyond the city limits unless you have the permission of the chairman of the board.
  6. You may not ride in a carriage or automobile with any man unless he is your father or brother.
  7. You may not smoke cigarettes.
  8. You may not dress in bright colors.
  9. You may under no circumstances dye your hair.
  10. You must wear at least two petticoats.
  11. Your dresses must not be any shorter than two inches above the ankle.
  12. To keep the school room neat and clean, you must sweep the floor at least once daily, scrub the floor at least once a week with hot, soapy water, clean the blackboards at least once a day and start the fire at 7 a.m. so the room will be warm by 8 a.m.

—By Karen Centowski

Taken from One-Room Schools of Knox County, by the Knox County Retired Teachers Association.

Education, Information, Status

ILLINOIS COAL COUNTRY

Leave a comment

Coal

Have you ever lived in a big, old, Victorian house with a coal furnace down in the basement? The coal was delivered down a coal chute to the coal bin in the basement. Maybe you even had a coal stove in the kitchen for cooking. The black stove was made of iron and had four burners on top. Leftover debris called “cinders” was scooped into a coal bucket and dumped outside.

Do you remember when cinders were spread on ice covered roads to create traction? The coal ash was usually available free of charge and was widely used before salt became popular.

Do you realize that over fifty percent of the electricity in the U.S. today is generated by coal? Coal is burned to provide the heat to turn water into steam. The steam drives the electric generators in power plants. Coal is also used in the production of steel, and it is used in cement manufacturing.

According to the Illinois State Geological Survey article entitled “Coal: Illinois’ Black Treasure,” the land that is now Illinois was covered by dense, tropical swamps more than 300 million years ago. Plant debris fell into the swampy water and, over time, were compressed to form peat. Over millions of years, the layers of peat were compressed and became coal. The “seams” of coal ranged from a few inches to ten feet thick. Outcrops of coal, thin seams that protruded from the soil, were also formed.

In an article called “The History of Mining in Illinois,” the author states that coal was first discovered in Illinois by Marquette and Joliet in 1673. They observed coal outcrops along the Illinois River. However, it wasn’t until the 1800’s that the pioneers in Illinois used this outcropped coal for cooking and blacksmithing. In 1848, the first underground mine operation in Illinois began in Belleville.

Underground mining was hard and dangerous work. Miners were lowered through a shaft to the mine floor. Using a pick and shovel, the miners dislodged the coal from the seam and scooped it into carts or baskets. To prevent the ceiling from caving in on them, they used the “room and pillar” method of mining. They left “pillars” of coal to hold up the ceiling of the “room” they were mining. Poisonous gas was a constant danger. Miners would take with them a domestic canary in a cage to detect poisonous gas. Miners were also in danger of drowning if mining operations punctured an underground reservoir or if adjacent land flooded due to heavy rainfall or melted snow.

At ground level, mining had a huge impact in Illinois. Because mining required thousands of workers, towns sprang up near mines. By the 1860’s, railroads had been built to carry the coal and agricultural products to market. In Christian County alone, the Pana Coal Company sunk a shaft more than 700 feet deep in 1882 and found a vein of coal from seven to eight feet thick. In 1887 coal was found in Taylorville. Coal was also found and mined in Edinburg and Assumption. In a book called Past and Present of Christian County, Illinois, published in 1904, the author, Honorable J.C. McBride, states that “From the mines in the county about 15,000 tons of coal contribute to the uses of man daily.”

Although most mining activity occurred outside of the Chicago metropolitan area, coal deposits were located in Braidwood. The Braidwood mine, located sixty miles from downtown Chicago, opened in 1865. In 1870, workers at the Braidwood mines produced roughly 230,000 tons of coal. Most of this coal was sent by train to Chicago. Production at the Braidwood mines was at its height through the 1880s. According to an article entitled “Coal Mining” in Encyclopedia of Chicago, “Output appears to have peaked around 1882, when two thousand miners raised 650,000 tons from the Braidwood shafts.”

Mining technology has advanced tremendously in the past hundred years. Instead of a miner using a pick and shovel, today’s miner operates a machine called a continuous miner. This machine is a type of tractor with wheels and large rotating teeth. The teeth turn and shear the coal into thousands of small pieces. Instead of women and children gathering coal in baskets, the continuous miner scoops up the coal and loads it onto a conveyor belt or into a shuttle car. The conveyor belt or shuttle car carries the coal to the mine’s entrance.

Coal continues to be an important commodity in Illinois. Statistics on www.sourcewatch.org show that Illinois coal output was 47.2 million tons in 2012 making it the fifth largest coal producing state in the U.S.

—By Karen Centowski

To learn more about mining, watch a History Channel film called “Coal Mining: The Dangerous Job on Earth—DOC FILMS” on You Tube.

Information, News

MAN SAVES DEER FROM DROWNING

Leave a comment

Deer

Sometimes a good news story captures the attention of the general public, and the video goes viral with over 8 million hits on the internet. Such was the case in 2010 with a video about Tom Satre saving four deer from drowning in the frigid waters near Juneau, Alaska.

Tom and his wife own a 65-foot custom made steel expedition trawler called the Alaska Quest. The yacht, used to give charter tours, has three private staterooms. Two have queen sized beds with a shower across the hall. The third has twin size bunk beds with a shower down the hall. The boat also has four kayaks and two skiffs on deck. The Web site is www.alaskaquestcharters.com.

During the cruises the yacht passes by glaciers and forests. Guests often see seals, whales, bear, deer, and other wildlife. On this cruise, Tom and the crew saw something different.

Tom and his family had decided to take the yacht to Taku Harbor, twenty-one miles from Juneau, for a picnic. During the cruise, four juvenile black-tailed deer swam directly toward the yacht, which was about two miles off shore.

Tom described the scene: “Once the deer reached the boat, the four began to circle the boat, looking directly at us. We could tell right away that the young bucks were distressed. I opened up my back gate, and we helped the typically skittish and absolutely wild animals onto the boat. In all my years fishing, I’ve never seen anything quite like it! Once on board, they collapsed with exhaustion, shivering.”

“Once we reached the dock, the first buck that we had pulled from the water hopped onto the dock, looked back as if to say ‘thank you’ and disappeared into the forest. After a bit of prodding and assistance, two more followed, but the smallest deer needed a little more help.” Tom got a wheelbarrow from a state park and carried the smallest deer to shore. The deer was able to follow the others into the woods.

To see a video about this amazing rescue of the four deer, go to Man Saves Deer from Drowning on Alaskan Waters at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yhnEs_mzOo.

PLEASE NOTE: If you are unable to access a video by using the link, type the name of the video into your search engine.

—By Karen Centowski