There are still a fair number of people around who attended the rural one-room (sometimes two-room) schools that dotted York County until the mid-twentieth century. Ask your parents or grandparents and you might get some interesting tales. (Including how they had to walk five miles through the snow, uphill both
The York City School District recently sold the Duke Street School at the corner of South Duke Street and East Hope Avenue. Many people probably do not realize that the building dates back to 1860 and that it housed York’s first high school. According to Prowell’s History of York County:
Some York County school districts didn’t consolidate until the late 1950s. Chanceford Township was one of the last to close their one-room schools, as the new Chanceford Township elementary school didn’t open until September 1958. Children attended one-room schools from first through eighth grades. Near the end of your eighth
Do we paint the 1950s as an untroubled time? Wrong! The 1950s began less than five years after the end of World War II. And we do remember what triggered the end of that war, don’t we? When refiling some material from the Gazette and Daily newspaper archives, Lila Fourhman-Shaull,
Numerous former one-room schoolhouses still dot the countryside. Many have been converted to residences, some so modified that it is hard to detect their original use. A few have been restored and even furnished as they would have been when students attended, with blackboard, desks and pot-bellied stove. These are
Advertisements from the York Recorder gives us an glimpse into educational offerings in York Town in the early 1800s. The first is for a small girls school, probably run out of a home: EDUCATION &c. &. Misses THOMSON and SCANLAN take the liberty of informing the inhabitants of York, and
Walking through the mezzanine gallery at York County Heritage Trust the other day, I stopped to take a new look at the cast iron lions guarding the stairs up to the second floor. I remembered some photos in the YCHT Library/Archives taken of them while they still watched over their
York County had hundreds of them, many still operating well into the 1950s. There are a lot of people around who attended one, and many of the schools still stand. Some have been converted into residences and others are in various states of repair. The York County Heritage Trust Library/Archives
I’m sharing this 1926 photo of Wills School, which is on the East Prospect Road (Rt. 124) just east of Yorkanna for a couple of reasons. First, it is nice to have one of these photos with the people identified, so many leave you guessing. Secondly, the Wills School has
Here is another example that the “good old days” weren’t always that good. There were “wicked and evil disposed persons” in our past history too. (Our forebears did love their adjectives.) The handbill below, from the York County Heritage Trust archives, concerns break-ins and vandalism at Spring Garden Township school