Get schooled on Ingham County’s historic one-room schoolhouses

Imagine a teacher giving a solo lecture about American history to a class of students ranging in age from 6 to 13. At one-room schoolhouses, teachers were responsible for everything, from stoking fires to writing lesson plans on the blackboard each day. Older children acted as mentors, and solitary studying was required. Discipline often came in the form of a yardstick. 

In its history, 155 one-room schoolhouses dotted Ingham County. The county’s Historical Commission has published a comprehensive guide on the subject, “Ingham County Rural One-Room Schools,” which can be ordered on Amazon.  

Editor Audrey Z. Martini, who spent years compiling the information for the book, will speak at an event hosted by the Historical Society of Greater Lansing at 1 p.m. Saturday (June 1) at the Library of Michigan’s Lake Erie Room. Books will be for sale in the Michigan History Museum’s gift shop on the first floor. 

Most of the schools were in rural areas, and  children would walk to school since school buses had yet to be introduced. Most were also heated by wood, and in exchange for totes of wood, parents would get a discount on tuition, Martini said. 

Some of the schools were founded in the earliest days of Michigan’s statehood, and many continued to operate into the 1960s. They were gradually replaced by consolidated school districts like Mason, Okemos, Williamston and Lansing. 

Today, most have been torn down or converted into public museums or homes. With the exception of tattered composite photographs of classes, most of the history has been lost to time. The last operating one-room schoolhouse in Ingham County, White Dog School in Williamston, closed in 1966. A headline in the local newspaper read, “White Dog Snaps, Bite Gone.” 

Martini said approximately 50 former one-room schoolhouses are still standing in Ingham County, and 30 of them are private residences. 

Martini herself attended a one-room school, the Bachelor School in Bunker Hill Township, starting in 1952 as a “beginner,” which was equivalent to kindergarten. Stockbridge later annexed the area, and the school was closed in 1958. 

“My mother was also a teacher, and she was upset I was going to a country school with outhouses in terrible condition. She was bound and determined to close the school,” Martini said. 

Today, like many other surviving one-room schoolhouses, the Bachelor School is privately owned and used as a storage building. 

Martini visited all 155 former schools while writing the book, which includes 200 photographs sourced from private sources and Capital Area District Libraries’ Local History collection. Each school was given two pages, including an exterior photograph of the school and an interior shot when they were available. When photographs were unavailable, maps were used to show locations. 

“Locations for the schools were mostly determined by the locations of settlements. In 1827, territorial law mandated that settlements with 50 or more families were to have a public school, and residents could petition for one,” Martini said. 

Lansing had three one-room schoolhouses, which were more like shanties and only lasted for a short time before becoming part of the school district. 

“It was a real challenge to sort out Lansing’s one-room schoolhouses,” Martini said. The earliest one, Union School, was located in what was called the Lower Village, now called Old Town, and was constructed in 1847. In 1851, it was replaced by the Cedar Street School. 

The book also includes 20 pages of teacher names, listed by school.  

“My teacher was Roscoe Spencer, and word was he was sent to the school to straighten the boys out,” Martini said. 

For her, the most fruitful part of putting the book together was talking to people who attended the schools and listening to their stories. One of the most difficult parts was deciphering the old records, which were often inconsistent or straight-up wrong. 

Today, one-room schoolhouses are often romanticized. An old song goes: 

School days, school days 

Dear old Golden Rule days 

Readin’ and ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmetic 

Taught to the tune of the hickory stick.