The Canadian One Room Schoolhouse Thread

In the spirit of the Lighthouse Trophy thread on the Ride The Rock forum, we thought it might be interesting to have a thread to collect pictures of one (and two) room schools which are no longer used as schools.

There are many of these still out there, some being used as houses or stores, so it should be fairly easy to spot them.

The object of the exercise will be to get a picture of your bike, or part of it anyway, in a picture of the building. In this picture, or an additional one in your post, there should be a picture of the SS stone, which indicates the School Section the school is in.

If you happen to know anything about the school, either from having been a student/teacher/staff in it, or what it is now being used as, we'd love to hear the story. Better yet, if you have old pictures of it, please post them. Or links to anything relating to the school is also welcome.

If people want to participate in a friendly competition, we can keep track of who's found the most of these schools.

For this forum, the schools must be anywhere in Canada only.
Anyone interested?

I'll try get a few pics when I can. Went to a few myself, some are gone now.

You have to have a lot of respect for the teachers of the day, trying to teach grades one through eight in some cases, don't know how they kept it together!

No computers at that time...

I'll try and find some pictures, my grandmother was a teacher and when the students started going to school in town my grandparents converted the school to a house and moved out of the teacher's house. They were also farming the quarter the school was sited on.

Fond, fond memories of long ago days.

Found four, and possibly five today on a ride to Barry's Bay from near Ottawa.

Here are some pics - details later.









This last one, in Douglas, might have been a Loyal Orange Lodge.

Cool idea.

I hope to get out and hunt one down on Sunday.

Okay, details on the photos EmmBeeDee posted yesterday:

Rochefort, Ontario:




Ruby, Ontario



Augsburg, Ontario, curiously labeled SS # 5 and 3 Gratton and Algona (what happened to SS#4??)


Fourth Chute, Ontario



And the last one was in Douglas, Ontario



One thing we did find in our first attempt at searching out schoolhouses is that many of them have lost their School Section signage. Only the masonry buildings can reliably be expected to have this information, the other frame buildings have probably had the SS# covered up.

I'll have to think about how we can distinguish between a school building and an LOL building or even a community hall.

Generally though I think that if there is only one building like that at an intersection its probably a school. In Ontario they will have a 1/2 or 1 acre lot (early schools only had to have a 1/2 acre yard for the kids to play in, later this was expanded to 1 acre). If there is a bell then its a school. If there is a baseball backstop then it is a school.

Unlike lighthouses which are charted and classified, schools aren't documented, so part of the fun will be finding them all!

Another ORS we spotted today:

This would be the school at Freeland, Ontario. Interesting web page with vintage photo can be found here.

This one's at Blackhead, Newfoundland, just a couple of kms from Cape Spear. It's the most easterly one room schoolhouse in North America...

This old wooden school near the intersection of Dwyer Hill and Roger Stephens Drive in Ottawa is now used as a Cross Country Ski shack, and a place for Geocachers to leave their marks. There's a cache on the property.

These were taken today in Jasper, Ontario.

The one on the far left is my Grandmother. This picture was taken in approx 1920. The school is part of the town hall now outside of Sault Ste. Marie Ontario. I did have to do some retouching. If you see the students there are a few identical twins. There was a hole in the original.

Will post pic of bike in front when back up that way on it.

Great picture - she doesn't look much older than the students!

The building looks a little worse for wear, missing bricks in a few places. I wonder how well it's doing 90 years later?

Here is a photo of the one room school in the RM of Kingsley in south western Manitoba.

Calan818, BobMunz and Backroader's bikes in front.



Calan818 inspects the books


An example of the study material


The school piano


A dedication plaque to the Sec. Tres. of the Rural Municipality


The teachers residence located just to the north side of the school yard


A great idea for a thread...will be fun checking out some of the prairie schools and waiting to see who comes up with what.

Its funny but the school has been fixed up a bit. there is another picture of this at the little museum they have at the town hall. It isn't missing the students. So somebody in the area was from the school and donated the picture or something like that. Kind of cool i thought.

Kemptville, Ontario:

I love the cover of that book.... I remember having books like that when I was in school. I used to volunteer in the library at our son's school and one of my jobs was to weed out the books that were never borrowed. I found a gem called 'Tim learns about mutual funds' that had never been out....

Christian Island, Ontario



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