By ANN ALLEN
Indiana Correspondent

COLUMBIA CITY, Ind. — Bell in hand, Miss Elizabeth (Beth Ann Sickafoose), calls her one-room school to order.

Her students range in age from preschool to fourth- or fifth-graders, all of them eager to learn more about life as it was when “readin’, writin’ and ’rithmetic’ taught to the tune of a hickory stick” combined grades 1-8 in a room where computers were unheard of and the teacher arrived early to fire the potbellied stove.

Miss Elizabeth’s “school” filled one booth of the Whitley Country Agricultural and 4-H Learning Center and wasn’t quite as authentic as she would have preferred. For one thing, the desks, now antiquated, were modern versions of the way students learned when they sat on crudely hewn benches.

“Unfortunately,” she said, “none of those benches could be found.”
Instead, in a room dominated by a faded picture of former President George Washington, Miss Elizabeth bade her students enter, the girls curtseying to her and the boys bowing as she made seating assignments. She led the class in Bible reading, reciting the pledge to the American flag and showed them a McGuffey’s reader as well as a well-polished hickory stick – but made no effort to apply the latter.

 When a girl raised her hand and asked to be excused to go to the bathroom, Miss Elizabeth replied, “You may go, but do so quickly.”
On the girl’s return, Miss Elizabeth asked her to come to the front of the room to wash her hands in a basin of water on the teacher’s desk.

Stepping out of her role as Miss Elizabeth, Sickafoose told the children that in the old days, every student washed his or her hands in the same basin. “They threw it out at noon and drew a fresh basin for the afternoon,” she said.

Sickafoose, a retired elementary teacher, combined lessons she once taught with those she learned as a girl to help students with penmanship and reading skills. When she stepped out of her classroom for lunch, a man in a nearby booth found the desks full of students, including one wearing the dunce cap, while another youngster led class.

“They had you down to a T,” he told her later.

At a recent fair where the entire emphasis is on youngsters, this was exactly the response fair board members wanted to encourage when they established the museum’s learning centers.