Searching for Ghost Schools: A Photographer's Notes

In 1995 I began photographing small, remote location schools, curious to know if one-room schoolhouse experience still existed and how it compared to the past. Before long, I began to discover historic one-room schools predating those I visited.

Since then, this project has developed a life of its own with input from unexpected sources on schoolhouse history and related literature, the whereabouts of little known “ghost schools,” and memories of former teachers and students once associated with them.

These old schools still exist, often unrecognized, forgotten or camouflaged in their current uses. One Civil War era schoolhouse became a church; others have been architecturally altered to serve as community centers. Another, of particular beauty, has mellowed into peaceful existence as a vine-covered tobacco barn. Its wood plank wall, painted black, is still present, but seldom recognized as the original schoolroom chalkboard. Another is now a residence, the old schoolhouse entrance intact under a new, enclosed portico.

Numerous one-room schools continue to operate in sparsely populated areas of Montana. Some dating from the last half of the 19th century are still attended in California and a dozen or so are reported as preserved on college and university campuses. While I enjoy them all, it is the non-operational, abandoned “ghost” school that fascinates me the most.

The oldest schoolhouse photographed is the historic Sam Houston Schoolhouse, built in 1794, now preserved in Tennessee. Its narrow horizontal shutters were designed to open down to provide work surfaces for students. It is one of nine log schoolhouses found so far.

York Log Schoolhouse was built of chestnut logs in 1842 in Burke County, North Carolina. Threatened with demolition, it was dismantled, transported, and faithfully reconstructed in Asheville, North Carolina by the great granddaughter of the man who constructed it. Sturdy and intact, it became a private schoolroom museum, loved by visitors of all ages. For years it nestled in a flower garden, warmed in winter by its stone fireplace until it caught fire in 2006. Its log walls, and one sturdy old bench, were all that survived.

A later era log school in Oregon is almost too fragile to touch. With its newspaper chinking and bulging cardboard chalkboard, it is the most humble of the preserved schools I have photographed. Lunch boxes and tiny slates, a music scroll and an eraser brush occupy the dark, diminutive interior, notable for its thick velvety surface of dust. In Laramie, Wyoming, another tiny log schoolhouse displays one flat fabric mitten per desktop, used by long ago students to clean their slates.

A log cabin built by a mid-19th century settler became Bug Creek School. Long gone, it once operated as an “emergency school” in the coastal hills of northern California. The role this rustic schoolroom played in early homesteaders’ lives left indelible memories. One in a class of “five and a fraction” students, Darlene Whiting described details of girlhood school life set within the surrounding natural world and physical difficulties of that era. Her stories of mountain lions, horseback riding, flooding creeks, and learning from native children are vestiges of life in what remains, even today, a sparsely settled landscape.

One of the most remote school buildings, still graced with a tall wooden bell tower, stands in elegant abandonment, isolated in expansive fields of grass in southwest New Mexico. Two others are constructed of terrone, an adobe brick made of sod cut from the boggy river-bottom of the Rio Grande. Located in or near historic villages, they are being restored from near ruin. A narrow, pitted, rock-strewn dirt road leads precariously uphill to the ghost town of Silver City, Idaho. The treacherous drive is worth it, for there one finds a stunning schoolhouse, brilliantly white, radiant in the sunlight.

These “ghost” schools exist in every condition imaginable, from spotless museums to disorderly heaps of wood on the forest floor. In North Carolina, one was barely visible, all but submerged in a lush growth of late summer kudzu. In northern California, blackberry brambles have all but hidden another. One in the coastal hills has since burned down, another has simply vanished, and a third is finally being renovated. In Leggett, California, students posed for me on the site of their old ghost school. Overgrown in brush, the foundation is all that remains.

Some of these buildings are open to the air, strewn with abandoned books, carcasses of wild animals, and broken furniture.

A piano on its side has gone to ruin. Belfries are fragmenting and floorboards collapsing. White enamel water fountains remain intact in one, black slate chalkboards in another. Many are littered with the debris of decades of random use. In contrast, others are arrestingly intact. Sitting silent, locked, and alone, forlorn, faded, and plain, the tiny wood frame schoolhouse in Lower Bridger, Montana appears astonishingly true to its original state. Well pump, flagpole, outhouses, and the old playground are all still there.

Landscapes in which some old schools were established can be breathtaking to encounter, displaying vast expanses of unoccupied natural beauty. But when forests creep into the vulnerable buildings, and when wind and rain blow through shattered windows, the mood in these obscure locations veers from the lyrical to the genuinely ghostly.

Nila Morrison, the earliest former schoolteacher photographed, is now gone. As a child, she attended a “no-name” school “out in the country,” near Bridger Canyon, Montana. Instruction charts were used for learning arithmetic, reading, and spelling.

She described her girlhood journey from Montana to California, driving teams of horses pulling a covered wagon carrying her mother and “the baby.” After graduating from Humboldt State University in 1929, she became a teacher on horseback earning $90 a month at the old Capetown School, established in 1878 near California’s remote “lost coast.”

The presence of simple handmade schools, enduring a half century - or longer - abandonment, draws out bittersweet memories, and inspires storytelling for both young and old. Former Canal School students came together for the first time in fifty years for a group portrait at their old school on the Mad River west of Arcata, California. Later, Loleta Elementary third graders gathered around to listen as these “old students” described what school days were like in early decades of the twentieth century.

Other portraits show former student Charlie Pedrazzini at the old Eel River Schoolhouse, built in 1887 on the dairy farm where he was born. He began school there in 1916 at age six, and recalls that the teacher always brought her buggy whip into class. The same Loleta third graders made a field trip to the Eel River Schoolhouse for the purpose of creating a group portrait with Charlie. Using my old wooden view camera, we attempted to represent as extended a span of living history as possible in one photograph: 1887-2000.

Photographing these relic “ghost” schools, their related objects and environments, has become the focus of my documentary work. Recording the experiences of former teachers and students is part of the project.

Their stories range from schoolhouses blowing away in windstorms to families of gypsies enrolling their children in school. Audio taped memoirs and descriptive field notes provide real voices describing regional landscapes and the culture of school days as far back as 1842. Vintage photographs of early era schools, teachers, and students are included, along with antique schoolbooks and a literary anthology expressing the atmosphere of early American education. Portraits of contemporary schoolchildren are shown with their writing and art work inspired by Schoolhouse Odyssey related activities.