Civil War-era East School still stands as Medina’s historic treasure

If these walls could speak, they would echo with the sound of children’s voices singing multiplication tables — “five times five are twenty-five” to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.”

This vintage home sits at the corner of East Liberty and North Harmony streets in one of Medina’s most historic neighborhoods — and it has its own story to tell. During the Civil War era, it was a public school, one of four wooden schoolhouses in the village of Medina, known as the East School.

The others included the North School at North Broadway and East North, the South School at South Court and Lafayette, and the Central School at the south edge of East Smith Road, which served both elementary and high school students. Those three structures are long gone.

In an essay written for the 50th reunion of her Medina High School Class of 1876, Sarah Washburn Pritchard reminisced about life as a student in one of the little schoolhouses. Born in 1857, she began her schooling during the Civil War.

Her essay, published in the 1926 Medina High School yearbook, noted that “the old school rooms would be considered dreary places today.” She recalled raised platforms for teachers and double desks that seated two or three pupils, depending on how crowded conditions were. Heating came from a cast-iron stove fed with four-foot logs. Wooden blackboards, wall maps, a few textbooks and slates were the basic teaching tools.

Pritchard added, “We must not forget the water pail and battered tin cup, for only as a reward for good conduct were two boys allowed to fetch a pail of water from a neighbor’s well to pass the water on a warm day.”

McGuffey’s Readers were the standard textbooks, with four levels of instruction. Students also studied Ray’s Third Part Arithmetic and Camp’s Geographies. Pritchard observed that once those subjects were mastered, some students considered themselves sufficiently educated and quit school.

She remembered with fondness learning lessons by song. “How we enjoyed it!” she wrote. “We sang in geography classes the names of the states and their capitals and the largest cities.” She added, “At present the instructors are against advocating the use of rhythm to assist in the memory of pupils.”

Spelling bees provided the greatest excitement on Friday afternoons. “We stood in line with toes touching the space where two floor boards came together, or a chalk line drawn across the boards, and all strove to reach the head of the class by correct spelling and receive ‘headmarks,’” she recalled.

The schools were not without disciplinary problems. “There were usually a few big boys who terrorized the little pupils and annoyed the teachers,” she wrote. “In these days of athletic sports such conduct is unheard of, but in those times they lacked a proper outlet for their energies.”

The era of the wooden schoolhouses ended with the great fire of 1870 that devastated Public Square. Out of the ashes came not only a rebuilt Victorian downtown but also a new school building — the Lincoln School — constructed in 1872.

The Lincoln School housed all village students from elementary through high school. In the 1880s, Pritchard taught fourth grade there. In 1912, rising enrollment led to the addition of the Garfield School beside the Lincoln building. In 1950, the original Lincoln School was torn down, and the Garfield addition was enlarged into today’s Garfield School.

Meanwhile, the small wooden schoolhouse once known as the East School became, and remains, a much-loved private home.