Omena School 1910 – Courtesy Omena Historical Society
Life was tough for little kids in the 1800’s. And in the winter, it was tougher.
Unnamed child feeling a bit low. Notice the mix of ages in the classroom.
The first “school” in Traverse City was a renovated log building that had been used by logging crews during the winters of 1851 and 1852. It was a “rustic” structure located in a wooded and undeveloped area at that time. Sometimes class was interrupted by garter snakes coming up through cracks in the floor.
Schools in Omena consisted of Craker School built in 1860, and the Omena School built in 1863. Bass Lake School followed in the 1880’s. Ernestine Freeland Johnson attended the Omena School, from the age of seven on, walking a mile and a half from her house in each direction. She and her brother and two sisters walked to school every day with the two Southwell boys. To make the journey a little shorter they walked down the railroad tracks and cut across a field and an orchard to get to school. In the winter the two oldest children would lead the way tramping down the snow so the littlest could get through. School started at 8:30 so in the winter they would be walking through deep snow in the dark. Perhaps some schools took time off when the snow got deep.
Horse drawn school buses were used until the roads began to be snow plowed. – Courtesy Randa Fredrickson and Omena Historical Society
Consolidation of Schools
After the school consolidated with Northport a horse-drawn wagon or sleigh brought the children to school. Claud Craker remembers times when the roads would be so muddy or snow clogged the horse couldn’t get through. The children would have to get out and push. Even though the children were covered with straw in the wagon and had heated soapstones for warmth, they would often get out and run along behind to stay warm.
A frequent from of discipline was for teachers to have children who whispered , talked, and disrupted the class come early the next day and shovel out the snow on the path to the boys and girls outhouses
According to Helen Goodale, the first teacher at this school, this sketch makes Traverse City’s first schoolhouse look much better than she remembers it. – Courtesy Grand Traverse Legends, Vol. I The Early Years
An Eleven-Year-Olds Memory
Elizabeth Williams, one of young Miss Helen Goodale’s first students in the one room school with the snakes occasionally coming up through the cracks in the floor, wrote this memory in her diary when she was eleven years old: “We were a happy lot, seeming like one family drinking from the same cup, swinging from the same swing, sharing our lunches together. We all loved our teacher Miss Goodale, though trying her patience often. Yet we knew and felt she loved us.”
Courtesy Grand Traverse Legends by Wilson, Omena Historical Society and the book Omena a Place in Time
Helen Goodale
Young Helen Goodale, Traverse City’s first “Schoolmarm”, recalled this of her first day of teaching school (which was summer term): “In a few days, the room was ready and one bright sunny morning I started out to find my school. It seems as if we never did have so many genial, delightful days as that summer, notwithstanding a heavy frost that whitened the ground on the morning of July 4th. My scholars numbered 21 as I can now recall them. Nine “neat girls” and twelve “sturdy boys”; happy interested children, some of them delighted with the novelty of a school in the woods, a few could not suppress the irresistible impulse to jump up and exclaim, ‘Is this really a school?'” – Courtesy Traverse Bay Eagle, March 31, 1896 issue, Grand Traverse Legends