Princeton Weekly Bulletin May 10, 1999

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I N   T H E   N E W S

One room school in Texas

[T]here has been heavy interest in a slender book called The One Room School in Collin County, Texas by Heather M. Brown ['99], who was an intern last summer at the Farmstead Museum. The book grew out of her assignment to research early educational efforts in the Plano area.

"It was supposed to be an academic study, but we enjoyed reading it so much that everybody wanted to make a copy," Mr. Peters recalled of the panel of local historians who reviewed the first draft. "It generated enough interest that people began suggesting we publish it."

Ms. Brown, who will graduate in June from Princeton University, spent 15 weeks on the project, but most of her time went to interviewing people who had attended one-room school houses in the Plano area.

"We had stories about the project in the local papers last summer and got dozens of responses from people who attended one-room schools," she said of the interviews. "It got a lot more personal than we expected. They're the kind of stories that everyone likes to hear."

Ms. Brown's 131-page book is filled with delightful first-hand accounts of the rough and tumble days when children walked to school barefoot, dragging a pail filled with remnants of dinner the night before.

"The path to school was neither smooth nor well-marked," she wrote in a chapter called "By Horse, Foot, and Buggy." "Some farmers plowed a furrow marking the path or tied rags to trees so that their offspring would not get lost. Mud was quite possibly the schoolchild's greatest burden, especially when he only owned a single pair of shoes."

"Four books on Plano history," By Sherry Jacobson
Dallas Morning News, April 16

 

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