Lower Saucon Township Historical Society: Lutz‑Franklin Schoolhouse

Description:

Visitors can step back in time to experience the learning environment of students who attended the one-room schoolhouse during the years 1930-1958. Artifacts and documents, including textbooks, maps, and photographs, allow visitors to develop a chronology of the schoolhouse and to construct a timeline that reveals changes that occurred in education in Pennsylvania.

From 1880 to 1942 the Lutz-Franklin School served as a one-room schoolhouse for the local community to educate children in first through eighth grades. The children walked to school daily with other family members and neighbors. The school had no indoor plumbing so the children used outhouses and hauled water from a spring for drinking and cleaning their desks. Since there was no electricity in the school, the students and their teacher relied on light from the windows to do their lessons. The one-room school was heated with a large Buffalo stove, and the boys took turns bringing coal up from the basement to warm the school each day.

School started each morning with the Pledge of Allegiance, Bible reading, the Lord’s Prayer, and singing patriotic and popular songs of the day. There was only one teacher for all eight grades. The teacher called each grade to the recitation bench in the front of the room to do their lessons. Younger students’ lessons included subjects like reading, writing, arithmetic, spelling, health, and grammar. Older students added to their lessons geography, history and English. Music and art were part of the one-room schoolhouse curriculum, and all students received a grade in deportment (behavior).