Remembering Dodge School

But some of them were even smaller than the others, and closed their doors long, long ago. Consequently, very few people still remember them.

“I just felt bad when I saw all of these other schools because nobody will ever know about the Dodge School,” said Harold Stone, referring to the ongoing series on one-room schoolhouses in the Bureau County Republican. “There’s only one other person that I know for sure in Walnut that would know about the Dodge school, but the rest? Everybody’s gone.”

The Dodge School — not to be confused with another Dodge School that was located southwest of Ohio — was once located just north of Walnut on what is still known as Indian Head Road.

“The school sat on the northwest corner of that intersection, and to the west was a building for the cobs and coal for the teacher to heat the building,” Stone said.

Stone was born in 1925, the first born son in a farming family.

“You’d just naturally go outside in good weather, and you’d have to help, like feed the chickens,” he said.

Stone said the Dodge School was the neighborhood school, educating the children of the people who lived “up the east road and down the west road.” It was located just south of the Lee County line, and students who lived to the south went into Walnut for school.

“At one time there was a dozen of them going to school there,” he said. “By the time I went to school, there wasn’t quite as many; there was probably about eight or nine.”

Stone said there might have been one other student his age when he started first grade.

“The first year, I thought the first grade teacher was a doll,” he said.

The teacher, Rena Christenson, was single, but Stone said she later married a George Taylor, who was a coach at the Walnut High School.

Stone said there wasn’t that much equipment outside to play on during recess, maybe just a slippery slide and a swing. He also remembers going to the front of the room to sit on the recitation bench for his classes.