The Nottawa Stone School in St. Joseph County: 1870-1950s

The original Nottawa school was made of wood -- by 1870 the wood was too rotted and the building too decomposed to continue having classes. So district director John W. Schermerhorn designed a new school building based on the school he once attended in New York.

At a cost of $3,000, the new school was completed that same year. In the late 1880s, a second room was added, making it big enough to hold 130 students. For the next seventy years, the school held classes.

It saw a jolt of rejuvenation in 1967 when the the Kalamazoo Valley Intermediate School System fixed up the school in order to depict what one-room schoolhouse classes were like to attend...not all fun and games.

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What was it like to attend a one-room school?

It was up to one teacher to teach kids from five different grade levels, which must have been exasperating. If a child was unruly and causing problems, he/she was made to sit in front of the class on the dunce stool, wearing a tall, pointed dunce cap, facing the blackboard with your nose pressed inside a chalk circle on the board. Too extreme? Didn’t matter...it happened anyway, and a kid paid the price for bad behavior.

The school had no running water and kids had to go outside to go to the bathroom – there was an outhouse for the boys and another for the girls. The teacher would put coal in the stove during cold weather, and make soup that would be ready to eat by lunchtime.

Pay a visit sometime to find out more about what it was like to attend...

The school can be found in St. Joseph County’s Nottawa Township, named after the Nottawaseppi tribe of the Potawatomi.