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The blab school -

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, most American students attended a one-room schoolhouse—even future presidents! Pictured is the one-room blab school attended by Abraham Lincoln in 1822. A blab school, also known as a vocal school, was a type of children's primary school found in remote rural locations and so-named because school kids recited (blabbed) their lessons out loud separately or in chorus with others as a method of learning. Image: Lincoln Museum, unknown photographer

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One teacher, one classroom -

As the 19th century progressed, blab schools became outdated and obsolete. But children still shared one teacher and one classroom. Pictured here in the mid-1800s is a one-room schoolhouse in Thomas County, Kansas. Note the sod, or turf, covering the roof used to insulate the building. This was frontier country, and winters were bitterly cold.

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Academic basics -

A single teacher would typically have students in the first through eighth grades, and she taught them all. The number of students varied from six to 40 or more, and were taught academic basics, usually reading, writing, arithmetic, history, and geography. This class of 34 with their teacher are posing outside their sod-roofed one-room schoolhouse in Woods County, Oklahoma, around 1895.

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The octagonal schoolhouse -

While most rural schoolhouses were rectangular in style and wooden in their construction, others were built in stone and octagonal in shape. Most of these were located in the northeastern region of the United States. In this 1890 image, students and their teacher are seen in front of the Eight Square Schoolhouse in Tompkins County, New York. It still stands today, restored and placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

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Lacking amenities -

Being mostly rural, many schoolhouses lacked plumbing or sanitation. Conditions were often harsh and uncomfortable, though this group of children and their teacher all managed a collective smile towards the camera.

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Photographic record -

This 1902 portrait of a teacher and her students was taken in Oklahoma's Indian Territory. The photographer is one Jennie Ross Cobb, who taught at this school following her graduation from the Cherokee Female Seminary. Cobb is the first known Native American woman photographer in the United States.

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Learning alongside each other -

Schoolhouses located in states where segregation did not apply quite often saw African-American students learning alongside white children, exemplified in this early 20th-century photograph.

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Segregation -

But where segregation laws of the time banned black students from attending school with white children, one-room schoolhouses accommodating only African Americans were commonplace. This image shows a class of well-dressed African-American school children with their equally well turned out teacher at school in South Carolina.

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Front and back -

Generally, younger children sat at the front of the classroom while older students were seated at the back of the room. Here, students of all ages learn in a one-room schoolhouse in Wisconsin in the early 1900s. Interestingly, older girls, pictured on the right, practice sewing and typing.

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Relocation -

This photograph of the one-room Leona Valley schoolhouse in California was taken in 1915 at its original location on Bouquet Canyon Road. In 2012, it was moved to its current location on Elizabeth Lake Road. Over the years, historic schoolhouses like this one have often been relocated to make way for development or repositioned as part of a preservation initiative.

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Typical school day -

A typical school day was 9 am to 4 pm, with morning and afternoon recesses of 15 minutes each and an hour period for lunch. This one-room schoolhouse stood on South River Farm in Maryland, seen here in 1924.

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Quality of facilities -

The quality of facilities at one-room schools varied with local economic conditions, with children from the poorest communities disadvantaged by lack of basic teaching materials. Fortunately, mobile libraries were on hand to lend out books on a rotating basis. Here, youngsters leaf through books provided by Tompkins County Library in New York state, in 1930.

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Poor attendance -

In the 1930s in America's Deep South, attendance at African-American schoolhouses was sometimes poor not because students were reluctant to learn but rather they were expected to work during cotton harvest, especially as America was in the grip of the Great Depression. Pictured is a class in the Mississippi Delta occupied by only the very youngest of children.

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Hand-built -

This is Rock Creek schoolhouse in Georgia, pictured in 1935. Materials used in the construction of buildings such as this one comprised boards and timbers that were hand-sawed and also hand-planed.

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Stove and candlelight -

The original caption to this photograph describes the rural schoolhouse in Richland County, Wisconsin, as soon benefitting from electrification. Many schools in remote areas relied solely on a wood-burning potbelly stove for heat and candlelight for illumination in the depths of winter.

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Lunchtime -

In fact, a stove served a double purpose. Its primary function was to heat the room. But it was also used to cook lunch. This interior image of Churchill schoolhouse in Brockfield, New Hampshire, was taken in the early 1940s.

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The schoolyard -

Students are seen in 1940 at play outside their rural schoolhouse in Wisconsin. The schoolyard typically featured a basic playground, and an outside toilet.

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Education across the Great Plains -

One-room schoolhouses were once a common feature across America's Great Plains. In fact, by the early 1900s one-room schoolhouses dotted the countryside throughout the Great Plains and the Midwest to such an extent that the heartland contained nearly half of the more than 200,000 one-room schools nationwide. Pictured in 1940 is a schoolhouse in Ward County, North Dakota.

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Serving the community -

These schools served not only as a hub of learning for the community, but as the center of the community as a whole. It wasn't uncommon for classrooms to double up as venues for worship services, weddings, family celebrations, and even funerals.

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High literacy rate -

In time, Great Plains schoolhouses gained a reputation for providing a basic education good enough to produce a literacy rate that was higher than that in many other parts of the nation.

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No school bus -

If they were fortunate, transportation for children who lived too far from their schoolhouse was provided by locals using horse-drawn kid hacks or a sulky (a lightweight cart on two wheels). Later, automobiles were used.

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Walking to school -

In poorer rural regions and in some southern states, students and teachers most likely had to walk to school. Use of a vehicle was limited in many areas due to badly maintained roads. Here, children gather with their teacher outside Mount Lebanon School in the Chattahoochee National Forest, Georgia.

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Chalk and slate -

In the 1800s and early 1900s, blackboards were exactly that—a piece of board painted black. It was not until much later that slate was used for chalkboards, although students often had individual slates for writing practice. In this Breathitt County, Kentucky, schoolhouse, some of the students are seen writing on an improvised blackboard, still being used as late as 1940.

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Amish schooling -

One-room schoolhouses are still used today by the Amish, such is their adherence to a simple lifestyle and limited adoption of modern conveniences and technology. Pictured in 1941 is an Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and looking much like one you'd see today. Image: Irving Rusinow

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Enlarging the curriculum -

By the 1950s, many one-room schoolhouses were being enlarged to incorporate a second room to accommodate ever increasing numbers of students. Classroom facilities were improving, but as is evident in this image taken in a Long Island school, basic amenities like a stove (probably by now burning coal) were still required.

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Decline -

As the 1950s progressed, one-room schoolhouses were becoming scare. As mobility increased and the migration of population from rural to urban areas accelerated, the need for this type of educational facility dwindled.

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The 1960s -

However, people living in remote rural pockets of America still relied on the one-room schoolhouse as late as the mid-1960s, when this photograph was taken in Kentucky.

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School's out! -

By the mid-1980s, fewer than 1,000 one-room schools could be found throughout the nation, and most of these were located in the Great Plains states. Today, the vast majority of one-room schools in the United States are no longer used. Some were simply abandoned like this adobe schoolhouse in Las Animas County, Colorado.

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National Historic Places -

Fortunately, numerous one-room schoolhouses stand today as preserved and iconic buildings celebrated as symbols of frontier values and of local and national development. Many are listed on the US National Register of Historic Places, including this one, the South Branch School House in Branchburg, New Jersey, which dates back to 1873.  

Sources: (Visit Cherokee Nation) (University of Nebraska–Lincoln) 

See also: American landmarks. How many do you know? 

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