“Gentleman of the Old School”: William McGill & Frederick County’s Last One-Room School (Part 2)
During his last years of teaching at Philip’s Delight one-room school in Frederick County, Md., William McGill’s day began at 7 a.m. when he would get in the station wagon and drive up Catoctin Mountain on roads “so winding and narrow that he blows his horn constantly to warn the lumber wagons which frequently come the other way,” wrote William Stump for the Sun Magazine. The change in elevation was 1,500 feet over six miles of road. He would stop at the farms and cabins and pick up the older school children and then take them back down the mountain to Thurmont High School. Many of them were his former students so he would catch up with their lives and their studies during the trip. Once he dropped them off, he would turn around and head back up the mountain. Read more…
“Gentleman of the Old School”: William McGill & Frederick County’s Last One-Room School (Part 1)
William McGill would have laughed at the idea that students need to be educated in $60-million-plus schools to get a good education. He would have known. For nearly a quarter century, he taught school in the last one-room school in Frederick County. “Some people are of the opinion that youngsters can’t get an education in a one-room school. That isn’t keeping with the facts,” McGill told the Sun Magazine in 1952. “Since 1910, I’ve been teaching in schools like this, and I wish I had a dollar for every one of my pupils who went to the university. Why, last year Betty Ann Willard, a girl I taught, was the honor graduate at Thurmont High.” Philip’s Delight Philip’s Delight School was located off an old lumber trail surrounded by thick woods high up on Catoctin Mountain. Before the school closed Read more…
Early public education in Emmitsburg, Md.
Emmitsburg has always had plenty of schools. Of the 158 one-room schools in Frederick County in 1890 more than 20 were near Emmitsburg. This doesn’t even include the private and parochial schools in the town at the time. In a 1908 article in the Emmitsburg Chronicle, an old-timer recalled his experiences with some of Emmitsburg’s early schools. One school was on the former site of Helman’s store where Mrs. Reed, a widow, taught classes. “I was packed off to school when I was about five years old, with a small yellow book called an English Primer. The seat, a rough bench was much too high for my short legs and my feet hung some distance above the floor. The school was a sort of a go-as-you please affair, and I did not receive much attention from the mistress, who, by the Read more…
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