24 Things Every American Farm Kid Carried To School In The 1950s (No One Can Use Them Today)

It is still dark on an American farm in the 1950s, and a child is already walking. The barn is behind them, the chores are done, and there is no bus at the end of the lane and no backpack on anybody's shoulders, because in that decade a backpack was for people hiking in the mountains. One hand has a dinner pail. The other has four schoolbooks that belong to the family, not to the school. Two miles ahead, across a wheat field and a fence line, stands a small white building with one room, one teacher and one stove, and every grade in the county sitting in it at once. This episode counts down the 24 things a farm kid actually carried through that schoolhouse door, from the smallest thing in a pocket to the one thing that mattered more than all the rest put together. You will find out why the big pink eraser did not show up until third grade, and what a child did about mistakes before that. Why the fat primary pencil was sharpened with the teacher's pocket knife while you stood and watched. Why a box of eight watercolor paints came with a rule attached, and why farm children painted with muddy water and thought nothing of it. Why the bottle of white glue on a September shopping list had to survive until June. Then it gets heavier. The bottle of milk that came from your own cows, one per child, still worth drinking at noon. The wide-mouth glass jar of soup that a room full of children heated themselves on a live stove, in pans holding two or three inches of water, a quarter hour before dinner time. The thermos in the dome of the lunch box with its red lid for a cup. The lunch pail itself, which in one school fed several children of the same family out of a single container, and which told everybody in the room exactly what your family could afford. And then the items that were not objects at all. The dress your oldest sister sewed for a home economics project. The saddle oxfords that would not wear out, and the barefoot months that made sure of it. The long pants a girl pulled on under her dress for a bitter walk and took off at the door. The younger brother or sister who was your responsibility for two miles, with no adult anywhere on that road. The morning water duty. The stove that had to be brought up from 50 degrees by the children who arrived first. There is also one item in this list where the accounts flatly disagree, and we say so out loud instead of picking the prettier version. Two country schools twenty miles apart could be teaching in two different centuries, and the sources still argue about it. By the last few numbers this stops being a list of things and becomes something harder to replace. The final item is not in any museum case, and it left the day the one-room schools closed and the buses started running into town. If your parents or grandparents walked to a country school, tell us in the comments what they carried and what they had to leave behind. Subscribe for more of the everyday American farm world of the 1950s, object by object, before the last people who used them are gone too.