Beyond Slate Pencils: Schoolhouse Artifacts and Community History
By: April M. Beisaw and James G. Gibb
Paper Presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference, St. Louis, Missouri
Abstract: Lack of a guide to school artifacts has hindered archaeological study of schoolhouses. Illustrating archaeologicallyÐrecovered artifacts from schoolhouse sites in Maryland and Michigan combined with patent and advertisement research, this paper offers the first comprehensive archaeological study of the material culture of rural American schoolhouses. The authors use these images to explore the variability and historical significance of schoolhouse assemblages.
Introduction
Professional archaeologists have given schoolhouse sites short shrift. Disagree? Conduct a literature search. We have and found few sites investigated, and fewer reported. Extensive excavations of these sites are virtually unknown, but we have documented several instances of school sites having been tested and reported, including several of our own efforts. (Midwestern Archaeological Research Services has offered a gratifying exception in its work at two Illinois school sites, reported at this conference by Carrie Koster-Horan, and we will refer to that work in this paper where appropriate.)
Buildings
The most prominent artifact on a schoolhouse site is the schoolhouse and its ancillary buildings, if any, whether extant or buried ruin. We have discussed architectural variability in previous papers and in a piece published in Northeast Historical Archaeology (Gibb and Beisaw 2000) and April has documented design continuity in the rebuilding of a burned school on its original footprint. Here we deal briefly with school architecture and offer a small sample of the range of variability exhibited among one and two room schoolhouses, two of which we have tested, this by way of an exhortation to colleagues to consider standing structures in their analyses of school sites.
1. Little Red Schoolhouse, north of Easton, Maryland, 1870s
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2. One room schoolhouse in Calvert County, Maryland, early 20th century
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3. Prospect School, a stone masonry hexagonal school in Darlington, Maryland, reputedly built in 1830, closed in the 1930s, a victim of consolidation.
4. Seneca schoolhouse near Potomac, Maryland, built in classic post-1865 style, but in brick.
5. Nottingham School, Maryland, a slightly larger building in the same style, but frame.
6. Oella School, built 1878 and added to in 1894, a modification in both footprint and materials on the previous two schools. The district closed it in 1924 because of consolidation. April and I tested and reported on it several years ago.
7. Blaess School near Ann Arbor Michigan, excavated by April.
Plant
April and I also have commented on the physical plants of schoolhouses, discussing heating and ventilation systems, in particular. These were "hot topics" at educators' conferences throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries and were discussed in great detail in their professional publications, as well as in reports of state educational agencies.
1. This, for example, is a graphic model of the "Smith System" of heating and ventilation reproduced in Foght's 1918 book on rural schools.
2. This "injecting ventilator" appears in Henry BarnardÕs 1848 book on school architecture, as does the
3. ornate Culver's register.
Heating and ventilation components have been recovered from the Oella and Blaess school excavations, as well as from other school sites.
Desks were also a point of concern and considerable debate and experimentation, leading in part to the patenting of numerous designs and the sale of different models that came in different sizes to accommodate up to three sizes of children.
1. Wale's American School Chair and Desk, for example, appeared in Barnard's 1848 publication and MarylandÕs first Superintendent of Schools, Libertus Van Bokkelen, recommended a design patented by his clerk, W. Horace Soper,
2. an example of which has been preserved at the Anne Arundel Free School Museum. Note the 1863 patent date and, ironically, the misspelling of "Patented."
3. April and I recovered an identical piece, with some of the embossing discernable, from deposits within the Oella schoolhouse in Maryland.
4. April also recovered a desk part of uncertain manufacture from the Blaess School in Michigan. Jeanne Ward recovered an 1883 Columbia No. 3 close desk panel from the Stanley Institute on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and Carrie Koster-Horan reported desk parts from the 1868 Meade School in Illinois.
The physical plants and furnishings are direct manifestations of each community's interest and investment in their children. They were clear representations of pride, or neglect, of children's education, and as such provide important information that transcends individual farmsteads and tenements.
Ephemera and School Activities
We are also interested in the individual behaviors within schools as expressed through the kinds of objects that teachers and students brought to school. Much of that material isn't likely to have preserved at school sites, such as:
1. notebooks and other papers, although they may survive, like Idella Reiff's composition book, in the hands of their descendents or in local archives, and
2. textbooks. Lists of textbooks, however, can be found in the annual reports of individual schools and districts, replicated in the annual reports of state school superintendents.
Many other activities, at first blush, required little or no material other than dedicated or multi-use spaces,
1. such as athletic activities, as in this Dunn County, Wisconsin gymnastics class,
2. or play and lunch at the Magothy School in Maryland; but even these may leave tell-tale evidence of a fragmentary and infrequent nature,
3. like this Pennsylvania lunch box, now in a private collection in Delaware.
4. Educational activities beyond the '3 Rs' also may leave some traces, perhaps even indistinguishable from those remaining from school construction and maintenance, as for example with this manual training class in early 20th century Illinois.
5. Artifacts from classes in the domestic arts, as in this Wisconsin school, and
6. agriculture, as in this Colorado school also may echo common rural domestic settings of the early 20th century.
Manual and domestic arts, and horticulture, were hotly disputed courses in the last quarter of the 19th century and into the 20th century, and those same issues have reared up again in the face of periodic funding shortfalls and panic over test scores. Competitive dressing and conspicuous consumption also plague schools today and can be viewed in the past through such material remains of clothing as buttons and personal possessions such as pocket knives, parts of pocket watches, and porcelain doll fragments.
Conventional Education and its Artifacts
For the last bit of this paper, let's return to the principal school activities and their associated material culture.
1. This interior view of the Tick Neck School in Maryland, dated 1905, shows a good deal, even though much of the students' possessions probably were stored in the desks while the room was photographed. Note the apertures for inkwells.
2. April recovered several stoneware inkwells from the Blaess School; none were recovered from Oella, but the testing there was limited to two five foot units and a dozen and a half shovel tests. We note here that the use of ink on school sites is very important because it implies the use of paper, an expensive commodity until the widespread production and sale of pulp fiber paper in the last decade or so of the 19th century.
3. We might expect to recover glass inkwells from many school sites, especially those with deposits dating between 1900 and 1950. The amber and colorless vessels illustrated here are from a private collection,
4. as is this Skrip's Royal Blue inkwell and box, discarded from an archaeological collections facility that used the ink with steel-nib pens for labeling artifacts.
5. Note the patented design of the jar that allows access to the ink without excessive drying by admitting a small amount to a separate compartment.
6. Teachers likely supplied ink, at least in some schools, from large ink bottles, probably quart-sized. April recovered the bases of two stoneware ink bottles from the Blaess site, but none were found at Oella.
7. 20th-century ink bottles are more typically colorless glass, quart size, Carter's being one of the more common,
8. distinguished by the embossed name on the bottoms.
9. Among the bottles recovered from school sites in Michigan, New York, and Illinois have been those used, at least initially, for pharmaceuticals or patent medicines, such as Koenig's Hamburg Drops from the Blaess School. We think teachers may have brought these to school, or were supplied by parents, to dose individual students suffering from certain ailments, real or imagined.
10. We know of no instance of the iconic school bell, or fragments thereof, having been found on school sites, but they may exist on sites or in private and public collections.
Pencils
Perhaps the most common artifacts recovered from school sites, other than architectural materials and coal, are pencil fragments. The larger the number recovered, the more evident the variability.
1. Blaess School yielded some lighter colored pencils that may have been made from finely ground steatite and shale -extruded and kilned- but the majority are of the black slate variety, either cut from slabs and ground to form, or made from extruded mixtures of slate and clay that were fired.
2. Under magnification, a kind of reeding is visible on some pencils, probably an effect of extrusion. Reeding and perfectly round cross sections indicate extrusion of a paste through a die. All of the lighter colored pencils have one or both characteristics and probably are steatite.
3. Others pencil fragments bear chiggering marks on opposite sides, suggesting that they had been cut from slabs and subsequently milled, the saw marks surviving to a greater or lesser extent, often obliterated along much of the length of a pencil. The sawing and milling technique predates the extrusion and firing technique of slate pencil manufacture, but they coexisted in the 1870s.
4. The points are clearly hand sharpened with a pen knife, and
5. some have been scored at one end to accommodate a string tie, presumably attaching the pencil to a writing slate. The smallest complete pencils were one inch in length. Many, if not all, probably were paper wrapped or embedded in wooden cases, much like the so-called lead pencils currently in use.
6. Graphite pencils, ceramic products made from ground mineral carbon and clay, producing lead-colored lines but containing no lead, also were recovered from the Blaess site, lacking their wooden cases. Those recovered were sharpened mechanically, not by hand.
7. Although we know of no pencil sharpeners, or fragments of sharpeners, recovered from school sites, they no doubt will be found.
Widespread use of slate pencils, attendant upon the institution of state school programs nationwide beginning in the 1860s, prompted would-be inventors and industrialists to develop and patent designs for sharpeners, as well as of desks and other school paraphernalia, a sampling of which can be viewed through period Scientific American and Manufacturer and Builder magazines.
Koster-Horan has also reported fragments of writing slates from Illinois and these might be expected from any school site yielding slate pencils. Complete specimens survive in museum and private collections.
As a final note, Deborah Rotman has called for a close examination -an artifact biography approach- to domestic refuse recovered from school sites that were never used domestically. We have suggested that some vessel glass and ceramic sherds may be attributable to refuse from ice-cream socials and similar events. Both the Oella and Blaess schools yielded ceramics and those from Blaess appear to represent many different patterns, supporting the ice cream social hypothesis, individuals supplying food and drink served in household vessels. We also have learned recently of gifting by teachers to students of
1. objects that would not be out of place in a domestic setting, such as these two creamers now in the hands of a private collector, but given by a teacher to the collector's mother and uncle in the 1920s.
2. Idella Reiff also received a cup and saucer from a teacher, and a glass vase from yet another in the 1920s.
While most such gifts and awards, probably purchased in bulk, generally were brought home directly, some may have been broken on site, or otherwise remained on site when students failed to show to claim them.
We hope that this brief review provides some sense of the variety of non-architectural artifacts likely to be recovered from school sites if those sites are tested with sufficient intensity. That will not occur widely until archaeologists and preservationists take seriously the value of archaeological deposits associated with extant schools and ruins.