PHOTOS: Town's Students Travel Back in Time

Members of Mrs. Orr’s second-grade class at Gallup Hill School took a trip back in time this week. They were among the dozens of Ledyard elementary school students who boarded a school bus that traveled up Route 117 and stopped in front of the Geer Hill School, an authentic one-room schoolhouse founded in 1735.

There they were greeted by Mary Holdridge Foltz and her sister-in-law, Sarah Holdridge, both dressed in 18th century attire. The students filed inside and were seated at wooden, lift-top desks. Holdridge, working on a chalkboard (a precursor to the Promethean interactive smart board), taught the children arithmetic. She also gave them a lesson in the lost art of penmanship.

Foltz talked to the students about the schoolhouse itself, where students from grades 1 through 8 gathered each school day for almost two centuries. In the winter, the school was heated by a woodstove in the back of the lone classroom. There was no electricity or running water, but students could get a drink of water from a large earthenware jug that the boys kept filled. For “bio breaks,” there was a large privy across the schoolyard, with a boys’ side and a girls’ side.

In relating this information, Foltz was actually reminiscing. She and her sister, Janet Barnett, and two brothers, David and the late Bud Holdridge, attended the school, which remained active until the Ledyard Center School was completed in 1949. Foltz said the school, once the smallest in Connecticut, is alma mater to many members of the Geer, Holdridge and Clark families, among others.

This was farm country, she said, and every year the story is repeated of how, one warm spring day, a milk cow stopped by a poked her head right into the classroom through an open window. That favorite story has been depicted by one of the many students who has visited the school over the years. Her laminated drawing is posted in the entranceway.

Hosting the town’s students this week was a warm-up for this Sunday, Oct. 16, when both the Geer Hill School and Way Station on Church Hill Road will host an open house, from 2-4 p.m.

Built in 1816, the Gurdon Bill Station, a country store and stagecoach way station, was once a meeting place for local residents as well as passing travelers. Bill, benefactor of the Bill Library, lived in the house across the road, which is now the parsonage for the Ledyard Congregational Church.

Sponsored by the Geer Hill School Association, the open houses are free to the public. Donations are happily received.