1990 Lessons Being Taught at an 1860 Schoolhouse

Schoolchildren from around the state take field trips to this historic gold rush town and relive what school was like in 1860.

Classes are conducted for the visitors as they were when the Columbia school opened that year. The two-story, red-brick schoolhouse stands on a hill overlooking this hamlet in Tuolumne County.

Students learn old-fashioned penmanship. They read from McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers. They work math problems from 130-year-old arithmetic books.

Some of the desks are original 1860 lift-tops with inkwells. Others are replicas. Rooms are lighted with kerosene lanterns. A potbellied stove provides heat. There’s a dipper and water bucket for drinking.

An American Flag with 33 stars hangs in front of the classroom. There were only 33 states in 1860.

Behind the school are two outhouses. No indoor plumbing here. A crooked oak stick lies on the teacher’s desk.

“Teachers were strict in those days,” said Ralph Hilbert, 68, a retired Whittier elementary school teacher who was portraying a vintage-1860 instructor. Dressed in a derby, long black coat, stiff white shirt, bow tie and black trousers, he waved the stick in the air.

“If a projectile of any kind was thrown, it was five whacks on the backside with a stick like this,” he said. “Fingernails, necks and ears were inspected for cleanliness every morning before class.

“Nothing was to be placed in inkwells except pen points. Each child had duties, fetching a pail of water, cleaning the erasers and blackboards, sweeping the floor.”

All of Columbia is a state park. Founded in 1850, it is the Williamsburg of the West Coast. The 19th-Century homes, shops and public buildings here were set aside as a California State Historical Monument in 1945.

For 77 years kindergarten-to-eighth-grade classes were held in the old schoolhouse on the hill. After the gold rush, Columbia thrived for a while. But gradually, the town lost residents, and in 1937, during the Great Depression, the school closed.

For several years after the town became a historical monument, the school remained abandoned. It deteriorated. It was falling apart.

In the late 1950s, a fund-raising campaign to save Columbia School was conducted in elementary schools all over the state. Thousands of students contributed pennies, nickels and dimes to rescue, restore and preserve Columbia School.

Columbia School reopened as a museum on its 100th birthday, brought back to what it was like when it first opened in 1860, thanks to the more than $60,000 donated by boys and girls.

Ever since, the old red-brick schoolhouse has belonged to all elementary school children in California.

Five years ago Sherrin Grout, 42, longtime ranger at the Columbia historical park, and Hilbert, along with several teacher volunteers, brought the school back to life by conducting 1860 classroom sessions and making it more than just a museum.

“To participate in this unique experience, schools make reservations in advance for field trips to Columbia and the old schoolhouse,” Grout explained. “Students come here, sit in the old desks and learn from Ralph Hilbert and the other volunteer teachers what school was like in California 130 years ago.”

Hilbert noted that when the school first opened in 1860, students sat on the floor.

“The school furniture hadn’t come around the Horn yet from the East,” he related. “Boys and girls sat on separate sides of the room then.

“Girls entered and left class before boys. Students were not permitted to write using the left hand. Their clothes had to cover their legs and arms completely.”

If a student misbehaved, Hilbert continued, the culprit would get whacked with the oak stick or sit on a dunce stool the rest of the day wearing a long, pointed dunce hat.

“The kids tell us they’re glad they’re going to school now, not then,” Grout said.