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A history of how the public schools were conducted in the early settlement of Fulton county may be interesting to some of the readers of The Democrat; so I will give a little of my experience and observation in regard to some of them.

For several years after the first settlement of the county there were no public school funds to pay the teaches, and when a school was needed in a town or neighborhood the teacher would go around amongst the patrons of the school with a subscription paper to see how many scholars could be obtained, and if enough could be obtained to justify him teaching, he would take the school. The term that the schools were taught was three months, and the tuition was from $1.50 to $2.00 per quarter; and if the patrons were satisfied with the teacher they would engage him for another term, but not for more than three months at a time. The branches taught were reading, spelling, writing, arithmetic, geography and grammar. The school would be graded into first, second and third classes.

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In opening the school in the morning the first class was required to read a chapter in the New Testament, and, if the chapter was a short one, they would read two chapters, each scholar reading one verse. The teacher would usually consume about half an hour each forenoon in making and repairing pens and setting copies for those that were learning to write. At that time there was no such thing in that part of the country as gold or steel pens, and all the pens used for writing were made from quills plucked from the wings of a turkey or a goose. The first steel pens introduced was about the year 1831. I remember that in 1831 my father went to St. Louis and laid in a stock of goods, and among his purchases were a half dozen cards of steel pens. They came fastened on cards, a dozen on a card. That was as many as any merchant thought it prudent to buy at one time. The use of them was strongly disapproved of by the teachers. They would tell the scholars that they would never become good writers if they learned to write with a steel pen. The price they sold at when they first came in use was 12½ cents a pen. The steel pens at first used were much coarser and heavier than the pens now used, and a very great improvement has been made in them since they first came in use.

It was the custom in those times that when a teacher took a school to make a statement to his scholars of the rules and regulations by which the school was to be governed; and if any of the scholars disobeyed those orders and regulations they were to be punished, whether male or female; and it made no difference how old, or how young, or how large, or how small, they would all come under the same rule; and their rules were like the laws of the Medes and Persians—were unalterable. They had two modes of punishment. One was to be whipped, and the other to stand upon a bench to be gazed at by the whole school until the teacher ordered them to come down.

I will relate some of the circumstances at a time when the school was taught in the old log court house in Lewistown. The schoolteacher was an old Englishman by the name of John Elliott. He had only been a short time from the old country when he came to Lewistown and took the school. He was low in

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stature, but very fleshy and corpulent, and a fair specimen of genuine "John Bull." One of the rules of his school was that if any scholar should absent himself from school for fifteen minutes after school was taken up he was to be punished, unless a satisfactory excuse could be given. It was in the fall of the year, and at a time when the woods around Lewistown were full of nuts, wild fruit and grapes. So one day, during the noon spell, a dozen or fifteen of us took a stroll through the woods on the hunt of nuts and wild fruit. But it so happened that we ventured so far away that we did not get back until school had been taken up about half an hour. So, having broken one of the rules of the school, we all had to be punished. The boys were called up, one at a time and each received four or five strokes across the back with a whip. There were three young ladies that were attending school who were in the company of the transgressors. Their ages ran from sixteen to eighteen, and the punishment meted out to them was that they were to go up into the judge’s stand and climb upon the top of the judge’s writing table. The young ladies were Miss Sally Laughton, daughter of John Laughton; Miss Nancy Johnson, daughter of William Johnson, who was one of the county commissioners, and Miss Susan Wentworth, daughter to Elijah Wentworth. They were amongst the most prominent families of the town. The young ladies were all quite tall, and as they stood in a row their heads extended up to the upper floor of the court house, and, as the floor had been laid with loose puncheons, the young ladies amused the scholars by raising up the ends of the puncheons on the top of their heads. This so amused one of the small boys that he laughed loud enough to be heard by the teacher, who called him up to punish him for his rudeness, when he excused himself by telling the teacher that he could not help laughing, for Sally Laughton kept tucking her head up in the loft. After they had stood about twenty minutes on their perch they were ordered to come down and to take their seats. They knew very well that it would not have done any good to have resisted the order of the schoolteacher, for if they had, they would have been whipped the same as the boys had been. Some of the smaller sized girls that were among the

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truants were let off by having to stand for a short time up on the bench. The teacher would have regarded himself as being recreant in his duty if he had let anyone escape punishment that had violated the rules of his school.

The first schoolhouse that was ever built in Lewistown or in Fulton county was built on a lot that stood immediately west of the public square. It was built of round logs 14x16 feet in size and covered with clapboards held down with heavy weight poles. The cracks in the walls were chinked and filled in with mud. The floors were laid down loose with hewed puncheons. The door was made of rough boards and hung on wooden hinges with wooden door-latch. There were two windows large enough for a sash containing six 8x10 glass, but as glass could not be obtained at that time, oiled paper was substituted for glass. A chimney was made of lath and made with a huge fireplace in one end of the house, large enough to contain a log two feet in diameter. The seats were made from a section of a log hewed on one side and wooden pins driven in auger holes for bench legs with no backs to rest the weary body against. The school was kept in this log schoolhouse some two years and until the log court house was built; the school was then transferred to the court house and a great day was manifested by teachers and scholars when the change was made. It was the custom in those times for the teacher to retain the scholars in school from eight to nine hours a day, and when I look back and think about how us poor urchins had to sit in those hard and rough benches during those long and weary hours with nothing to rest our tired backs against, I cannot help thinking that it was a most terrible cruel treatment.

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