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The building in Upper Burlington now known as the Community Hall was built in the second half of the nineteenth century as the community school, a role it filled for many decades before the wave of school consolidation made it redundant in the early 1960s. It has since been converted to community social and recreational purposes. For most who attended it as pupils, the building will always be “The Schoolhouse”, an iconic image whose role was profound in their lives, equal in influence to the home, church, or other institutions that affected them. They might not remember the school lessons learned there, or the names of their teachers. They usually remember their schoolmates and a few teachers, frequently with some fondness, sometimes less so, and a few incidents that happened at school, or while traveling on an unpaved dirt road between it and home. Birds might have been singing in the trees by the school in June when you wrote exams with the windows wide open, but the memory of long, cold walks in deep snow in the winter would still be fresh. The one-room wooden schoolhouse within the community to which pupils walked up to 2.5 miles to and from daily has given way to multi-room brick structures with single grade classrooms in distant locations to which students are bussed almost from their doorsteps, with school populations so large you never meet or get to know all those attending. Those who attended or taught in the small one room wooden rural schoolhouse shared a type of experience that has disappeared. Their grandchildren and great grandchildren may wonder what going to school was like “back then”. We hope these pages will help them to know, and those who attended to remember. |