East Aurora Advertiser

Early Schooling: Individual Schoolhouses Dotted Landscape Before Centralization



It was a sad day when the “little school” officially closed. 

Garsha Robinson, who lives in South Wales, doesn’t remember being told that she had to transfer from a two-room schoolhouse on Emery Road to Holland Elementary. She doesn’t remember the adults in her life discussing that her school was going to close, where she was one of 13 students with her siblings and several cousins. But she does remember what it was like to get on a bus for the first time to attend a regular school.

It was 1967 and Robinson was in fourth grade.

“I was truly culture shocked to have to get on a bus and go to Holland. I was traumatized by it,” Robinson said. “Going to Holland was scary. I was crying because there were so many kids. I didn’t like the desks; we had the ‘old school’ desks where the seat was attached to the person’s desk behind you. This school had bells and different teachers and hallways and it felt like the twilight zone.”

Robinson always referred to this schoolhouse as the “little school,” but to the surrounding area it was known as Aurora-Wales District 8. It was built around 1850. This schoolhouse, and others like it, were part of the state’s Free Common School system, serving students that lived within a few miles of the building from first to eighth grade. The district lines were laid out by local officials, and there were over 10,000 common school districts scattered throughout New York in the nineteenth century.

Kirk Herniman and his sister Lynn Wilkins celebrating Halloween in the 1950s with their classmates at a schoolhouse in South Wales. Kirk is dressed as a lion and Lynn is dressed as a ghost. They made the masks from paper bags.

A historical marker on the grounds of former school Aurora-Wales District 8 says it was the last common school district in the state to close.

School Life

When Elma resident Les Price was younger, he would walk to school when the weather was bad outside. If it was nice, he would either ride his bike or his horse, which would stay tethered in the schoolyard all day. He attended three common schools before he graduated from East Aurora in 1953: one in South Schodack, near Albany, one in Amherst and one in Java. He is 87-years-old. He remembers one of his schools being more modern and having a furnace, but the school in Java was heated with a wood-burning, pot-belly stove. 

“The boys were responsible for tending the fire and bringing in wood,” Price remembers. He was usually at school by 7:30 a.m., a half hour before the bell rang. 

“In the morning, I would go down and sweep the floor to get things ready. Other boys would bring in the wood and they would get everything going,” Price said. 

Kirk Herniman and his sister Lynn Wilkins began attending a schoolhouse on Fish Hill Road in South Wales near East Creek Road when they were 5-years-old and ready for first grade. This was before many school districts offered kindergarten, which is still not mandated by New York State. 

Sometimes they would walk to school with their mother, but Herniman also remembers a school bus picking up the school children and taking them to school. However, bus rides were not always possible during heavy snowfalls.

“If the bus couldn’t make it up the hill for some reason, me and my sister would take Clydesdales to school that a local farmer owned to plow his fields,” he said.

Throughout the year, they always made it to school and neither of them recollects school being called off for the weather.

“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t, I just don’t remember it,” Herniman said. “I don’t know how they would have gotten in touch with us anyway. We had a party line at our house but the school did not have a telephone.”

Nor did the school have plumbing for a bathroom.  

“With the potbelly stove and an outhouse, it was like Little House on the Prairie, I swear to God,” he said. 

When mittens were wet from playing in the snow during recess or from walking to school, everyone would lay them near the potbelly stove to dry before heading home.

School # 6 was constructed in 1856 and burned in 1875. It was later rebuilt. In 1963, the school became the Elma Town Hall. Image Supplied by the Elma Historical Society.

His sister Lynn says that she enjoyed her education during those early years and she always thought of it as being a second home instead of school. To this day, she can still picture their teacher – Miss Stemper – and she can’t believe the variety of subjects that Stemper taught her students in first to sixth grade.

“She even taught us ceramics in art. I don’t know how she did it,” Lynn said. “We read Dick and Jane, and had lessons in Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, but we also had lessons outside about nature and plants. It was very interesting. To me, it was the normal way to have school. It was like we were playing.”

Their father was on the school board for that district, and Lynn remembers the school began to receive improvements after he joined. Neither of them had graduated from the schoolhouse, because the family moved temporarily to Connecticut before heading back to the East Aurora area.

“In Connecticut, I had to ride a school bus that contained more kids than that entire schoolhouse. It was pretty brutal,” Herniman said. “The school had three floors, thousands of kids and I freaked out. I was held back, but I was young for my grade anyway without kindergarten.”

When it came to discipline in these small schools, there were not as many rules for the teachers to follow as there are today. Teachers would use dunce caps on children who were being punished and sat in the corner of the classroom, but other times, teachers used physical force.

“Sometimes we would get whacked, but not very often,” Price said, and he recalls one time when a female teacher grabbed him by the throat and was choking him after he came in from recess.

“What do I smell on your breath? Have you been smoking, she asked, while choking me. I said yes, but I don’t do it anymore,” Price said. “It wasn’t very hard and it only happened once.”

Sandy Radder now lives in East Aurora, but she attended Elma School #6. This was a three-room schoolhouse located at the corner of Bowen and Rice Roads in Elma. She is 76-years-old. 

Each classroom taught two grades, and by many standards the school was modern because it had hardwood floors and a furnace. Briggs Dairy delivered milk daily, which was available for students to buy during lunch. 

Radder doesn’t remember students acting up in first or second grade, but in third and fourth grade, students would get into trouble with the teacher a lot. Radder describes the teacher as being very petite and short-tempered. She liked to pull hair and hit students on the hand with a ruler when they acted up. If they were really bad, they sat in the coat closet with the door shut and if they were really, really bad, the students stood in the back hall where there was no heat.

Students who attended Aurora-Wales District 8 pose for a photo when the schoolhouse was still open. The date is not known.

“It was so cold that the milk was stored there, and you stayed until she said you could come back in,” Radder said. “She pulled my hair once, and it wasn’t nice. I think I was blamed for something I didn’t do so she pulled my hair.”

At lunchtime, Radder said students were allowed to walk to a general store and buy penny candy. The school did not have a library, so they were also allowed to walk to the library and pick out books after lunch, also. 

Radder attended this school until fourth grade, when all of the students were transferred to a one room schoolhouse on Seneca Street in Elma to wait for the new Iroquois Central school district to be finished.

In January of fifth grade, she started at Iroquois. The school was still under construction with the finishing touches, and she remembers it feeling new and modern. For the first time ever, she took a school bus, bought her lunch in a cafeteria, and children from the neighboring communities became her friends.

She believes her parents were ready to raise their baby-boomer children in this educational institution with more, modern amenities.

“The new school was probably a relief for the parents because it would bus the students,” Radder said. “My dad worked nights and you only had one car back then, so I don’t remember my mom doing much of the carpooling. I always got rides with neighbors [to the schoolhouse.]”

History of Local Education

By 1900, Elma had 11 school districts, Wales had 14, and Marilla, Aurora and Holland each had eight. 

As early as 1812, the New York State legislature began setting aside funding for common schools. Each district could match the funding with revenues that were collected from town and property taxes, but if the school expenses were greater than state aid and taxes combined, students were charged tuition to attend, so students from poorer families often did not attend school. 

The local history book, 150 Years in Aurora, said that schoolhouses were often dark and bare. There were hooks for coats, a shelf for lunch pails and water pails, and a washbasin for the students to use. There was no indoor plumbing. The blackboard was simply “boards painted black.” 

Student desks were fastened to the floor. The teacher had a desk as well, and there was usually an extra chair for a visitor. Teachers ordered textbooks from publishers with their own salary, and they waited to be reimbursed from the parents. Students had their own pens, ink, pencils and paper, and the teachers supplied scissors, colored paper, puzzles and other supplies.

Aurora Town Historian Robert Goller said he believes that East Aurora had a smaller number of schoolhouses compared to the neighboring communities, even though East Aurora had a higher population, because the East Aurora Union Free District was formed relatively early, in 1883. The district was originally formed by merging the three small schoolhouses on the west, central and east ends of the village. 

“The new Union District took over the Aurora Academy building, previously a private school at Main and North Grove Streets, and opened a public high school for the first time,” Goller said in an email.

According to the New York State Education Department website, Regents “advanced instruction” was available in private high schools known as academies or seminaries, which were early terms for high schools. The Regents monitored the progress of these schools and provided aid to expand coursework beyond the classics of Latin and Greek. 

By the 1850s about 165 academies around the state provided secondary education, and with the push to make common schools free also came lobbying to expand secondary education for everyone. The legislature voted to make primary and secondary school education free for all students in 1867 after several attempts, but “free, public education” was not added to the state constitution for three more decades.

“Some students from the rural school districts went to high school in East Aurora once completing grade school in their own neighborhood schools,” Goller said.

Holland also offered high school to students. The local history book Images of America – Holland cites in 1887, a few of the common schools came together to form Holland Union School. It was located on Pearl Street. High school students could study the classics or the sciences, as well as fruit growing and poultry raising, and tuition was $3.

The second wave of common school consolidations began occurring in the earlier part of the twentieth century, and these newly formed school districts were referred to as being “centralized.” 

Holland was the first community in Erie County to centralize. After many public meetings and several petitions, community members in all of the remaining common districts voted in favor of centralizing all schools in 1931. Students moved into the new building, which is still used as the high school, after returning from Christmas vacation in January 1933.

The history book The Centuries in Elma says the community voted down a proposition to centralize the common schools in Elma in 1913 to form one district within the town. The community voted again in the 1930s, and each of the 11 common school districts voted separately. Only three districts were ready for the change, and the proposition did not pass. 

After this vote, New York State withdrew the offer to centralize the school districts in Elma, and they recommended that all of the schools in Elma, Marilla, Wales and Aurora centralized to form a single school district. Aurora refused and opted to remain independent, so the other three communities proceeded without them. 

Twenty-three common school districts voted and approved centralizing in June 1953, creating Iroquois Central Schools, with a vote of 766 in favor and 724 opposing the measure. 

One month later, the first Iroquois School Board was elected. 

The leftover district school buildings and land in Elma were sold at auction, but the history book does not delineate if the profits from the sale went to the town or the school district. Goller said that the school districts generally inherited the profits, but he added that some of the buildings remained in use for several years after the larger schools opened.

Archived newspapers in the Aurora historian’s office say that in 1889, two common schools were sold to private buyers. One of them was the West End School, which still stands on Hamburg Street and is now a physical therapy practice. It sold for $605.

The school Radder attended in Elma later became the town hall, and today it is a private residence, as are the schoolhouses that Price and Herniman attended.

The schoolhouse on Emery Road serves two purposes today: it serves as the town courthouse and the Wales Historical Society Museum.

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