POLAND’S LITTLE RED SCHOOLHOUSE Old-Fashioned Education

Children dressed in prairie dresses and gingham shirts and played games consistent with the time.

Story by DENISE DICK Photos by WILLIAM D. LEWIS

THE VINDICATOR

Second-grader Tara Balestrino likes some aspects of school life in the 1850s — playing games, talking to friends — but she wouldn’t want to have been a student back then.

“I like my iPod,” Tara said.

She was one of the students in Lynne Stoll’s Union Elementary School class who visited the Little Red Schoolhouse this week to learn about its history and how students who attended it spent their school days. Each Union second-grade class spends a day at the schoolhouse each year.

“We’re spending the school day as they would have during the 1850s or 1860s,” the teacher said.

Girls dressed in prairie dresses and boots, and boys donned gingham or plaid shirts and suspenders to make the experience more authentic.

They watched an episode of “Little House on the Prairie” to prepare.

Children wrote with chalk on individual slate boards. They used McGuffey readers and at recess, played games consistent with the time: jacks, jump rope, stick ball with a rolled up sock used for the ball.

“We’re trying to make it as authentic an experience as we can,” Stoll said.

Tara dressed in a prairie-style dress she had for a relative’s wedding shower.

“We’re in the Little Red Schoolhouse, and we’re learning how it was in the old days,” Tara said.

She thinks — except for that iPod thing — it may have been fun to go to school back then. Her classmate, Sarah Leach, agrees.

“We spelled words on a chalk board,” Sarah said of the day’s events.

The Poland Township Historical Society leases the schoolhouse, formerly Poland Center School, because of its location at the town’s heart, from the school district for $1 per year.

The school, built in 1858, closed in 1915 and was used as an antique store and a Sunday school before restoration by the society started in 1974, said Pat Grimm, society vice president. Restoration finished in 1976.

The schoolhouse, on U.S. Route 224 at Struthers Road, is home to the society.

“We need volunteers,” Grimm said.

The society may be contacted at (330) 536-6877.

She teaches children about the history of the building, and Sue Holloway, society trustee and a retired teacher from Boardman schools, shares some Poland history including the story of the horse White Saddle, a former Clingan Road resident so named because of his unique markings. White Saddle’s owner, Esther Hull Miller, wrote a book about the horse and another about the log cabin that she and her family built on Clingan. The log cabin remains.

“They used to take White Saddle to the Canfield Fair,” Holloway said.