CONGRESS LAND

In new western states and territories, settlers established school funds, as dictated by the Ordinance of 1785….
    Frontier schoolhouses were makeshift institutions, sometimes with horse shelters, outhouses, a stove or fireplace, but little or no furniture. Most frontier children went to school only a few months each year, generally in summer and winter, since spring and fall were taken up with farmwork. Rarely did the school term begin and end with the same number of students.  Classmates dropped out or moved on when their families left town.
    At the typical frontier school, children brought lunch in a tin pail, usually an emptied container of syrup or molasses. The youngest children sat close to the teacher, usually sharing a two-person desk (when desks were available) with another child of similar age and the same sex. Often, girls sat on one side of the room and boys on the other. Sometimes boys and girls had separate recess times.
    Students helped each other, and class work involved a lot of memorization and dictation.  Reading, arithmetic, penmanship, and grammar took up most of the day’s instruction.  Students wrote on slates—thin pieces of gray rock—with pencil made of soft stone. It was customary for boys to spit on their slates and rub them clean with their sleeves.  Girls wiped their slates with rags, which they wet in a water bucket.
    The frontier school was not all memorization and dictation, though. One Indiana school had a “post office box,” in which classmates dropped “written questions on any subject which interests their minds.”  Their teacher, Cynthia Bishop, remembered the first question:  “What do men get drunk for?”
     In some frontier schools, older boys challenged male teachers.  As the school trustee for an Indiana town told the hero of Edward Eggleston’s novel, The Hoosier School-Master (1871):   “Want to be a school-master, do you? ... Why, the boys have driv off the last two, and licked the one afore them like blazes.... They’d pitch you out of doors, sonny, neck and heels, afore Christmas.”
      In a practice called “barring the door,” older boys barricaded themselves in the schoolhouse before school started.  If the teacher couldn’t get into school, classes were cancelled that day. Eggleston’s fictitious schoolmaster “took back” his barricaded school one day by dropping sulfurous powder down the chimney.