Hail To Days Of A Family In One Room

YORK TOWNSHIP, Pa. — Snell School is gone, its sturdy, one-room simplicity replaced by a handful of expensive houses. Only the spring from which students, in pairs, used to fetch buckets of water for the day's use remains.

In the nearly 60 years Snell School existed near Red Lion, hundreds of children sat at its wooden desks, crowded around its potbellied stove, wrote on its long blackboard and played games at recess in its yard.

Yesterday, some of them got together in a church parish hall for a reunion, the first in the history of Snell School. They came from as far away as Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina. They carried brown paper lunch bags with apples, bananas and sandwiches just as they did when they were schoolchildren.

The reunion was the idea of Madelyn Murrow and Robert Holtzapple, a member of the Class of 1950, Snell's last.

"We kind of went all different ways," Murrow said. "We just scattered, but when we were students we were all close, just like family."

In 1890, a school board decided the area needed a school. A tract was surveyed and purchased for $30. Snell School, one of thousands of one-room schools that operated in Pennsylvania during the early years of this century, opened around 1891. It closed in 1950 and was torn down 30 years later.

There is much to commend the one-room system of education, many at the reunion said. Students today may have it physically easier - no mile-long walks to school in the snow, no outhouses and no potbellied wood stoves for heat - but educationally they are missing out.

"You could review from the classes behind you and get a perspective on what was to come," Murrow said.

"I know you could get ahead if you were on the ball and alert," said Spencer Henry, Murrow's 79-year-old father who also attended Snell. "You'd listen to the upper grades and when you got to that grade, you were ahead."

Mildred Barshinger Grim began attending Snell School around 1912 as the 4- year-old tag-along guest of some school-age neighbors. "My mother knew where I was so she didn't worry. I'd sit between the two neighbor girls at their desk."

She recalled walking to school on days so cold "when we got to school the teacher would have a big basin of warm water to thaw our hands."

The water came from the spring down the hill about half a mile from the school. "The state had approved that spring for drinking water," Holtzapple said.