This page has been designed to help preserve all the one room school houses that are still standing in Boone County as of 2002. These school houses are quickly disappearing from this county because of the population growth that is occurring. If people keep coming and companies keep expanding then there will be none left in the future for us to remember them. For that reason we thought that we could make this page in remembrance of all the remaining school houses in Boone County.

Most one-room school houses are abandoned but remembered with appreciation. Students may have dressed in homespun and they may have come from humble homes, but they worked hard and received a good education. Hanging on the walls of the schoolhouses were pictures of Washington and Lincoln along with other historical events. The log houses were not constructed of nails because of iron being scarce. The schoolmasters ruled the one-room school houses from behind a sturdy desk warmed by a fireplace and illumined by candlelight. The schoolmasters supplies were a copy of a Bible and a switch (a slender tree branch) for disciplining unruly students.

People were as devoted to their school district as they were to their farms and small businesses. They arranged for a highly skilled carpenter to erect a wood-frame school building, although there were also brick and stone schoolhouses. In school they didn't get to sit anywhere in the room they wanted. The girls sat on one side and the boys on the other. Children misbehaved had to sit on the opposite side. The punishment of placing a misbehaved child on the opposite side often back fired. Bell towers were expensive and most school districts couldn't afford them, so schoolmasters had to stand outside a ring a hand bell to call their students to class.

The schools were usually heated by a potbelly stove fed by coal, split wood, or corn cobs. It was placed in the center or at one end of the room so that students froze in the corners of the room and roasted near the stove. Noon recess meant home-cooked meals toted in metal buckets. Lunch was usually sandwiches of cold sliced meat, dill pickles, hard-boiled eggs, and perhaps a jar of potato salad. Students would wash down their lunches with water from a well or spring. Everyone shared a washbasin, soap, and towels placed in the cloakroom at the entrance to the school. They washed up here for lunch and after playing in the dirt of the schoolyard at recess. The carpenter might also be asked to construct outhouses. They made one for the boys and one for the girls.

Teachers were quick to discipline students and they were supported but the parents, who were disgraced it their children misbehaved. The instruments for discipline were hickory switches and dunce caps.