Teachers / Education – February 14, 1952

Nearly fifty years ago the Campbell Lumber Company came down from Western Pennsylvania. They builded their sawmill and mill town at Campbelltown for to manufacture the lumber on ten thousand acres on Williams River. They asked for a big school house but the district board compromised on a one room building. It was used for a single term, and the present three-room house was erected. The first one was not wasted. Enlarged, it became the Church of the community.

The school is now crowded into two rooms, since the seventh and eighth grades are brought to the junior high in Marlinton. The third room and the coal room have been changed into as nice and neat kitchen and lunch room as are to be found anywhere. The patrons, through the Parent Teachers’ Association, have provided those extra touches in furnishings so necessary to mark the difference between chuck rooms and civilized surroundings. I refer to curtains, frills, furbelows, drapes, carpets and pictures on the wall.

Just a line or two here to emphasize the difference between the small log cabin schools of pioneer days and teeming rooms of the modern community school. As for teachers, then most any field hand did the sorry best he could as a teacher. Fortunate indeed was the school which could have the service of a bright young man headed for the ministry, law or medicine who took to teaching as stepping stone to his calling. Now it is professional teachers, men and women.

Times have changed with the centuries. The good Apostle Paul allowed the women to preach but not to teach. Nowadays we are none too favorably inclined to the woman preacher, but have just about turned the job of instruction into the capable hands and heads of the ladies. And it is all to the good too.

In this connection let me quote the old saying that to make a gentleman out of a man, you must begin with his grandma.