Located at Hoch’s Corner in Oley Township, the fieldstone one-room school house of Sarah Boone had long been a centennial of pioneer education, even though Sarah Boone was long remembered for female vocational education. Such as her treasured homespun designed embroidered folk art samplers, she taught her frontier women to make while living in the Oley Valley, located on a knoll between the Weidener and Hoch Cemeteries.
This abandoned public school dating from circa 1800 was the property of the Gideon Hoch farm that in its golden years, resumed back to the property of the Hoch family, which was then used to store old time farm apparatus like Conestoga wagon running gears with large rear wheels. Further down the road toward Lobachsville was an enormous double limestone kiln in which the Hoch family operated for fertilizing their fields and probably sold limestone deposits to the Oley Iron Furnace.
A frontier farmstead, the Hoch roadways and farm fields were still outlined by split rail fences going to the village of Lobachsville which also border the Jacob Keim homestead who married Magdalena Hoch along Boyer road in 1753 where there was a second log cabin school house to teach frontier children. But in the early American period of time, there was no confusion that the offspring of these farm families cherished agrarian knowledge that would lead them to continue in the devoted expertise of their ancestors whose success at farming was unequaled.
Naturally the PA German parochial church schools that were familiar to the natives who spoke the PA Dutch Dialect were favored when public one room school houses were established in the Oley Valley and surrounding areas. And English speaking Quakers did not oppose them. However, early Mennonite families and staunch French Huguenot descendants were not sure of modern secularization of their European offspring. But freedom of education like freedom of religion was important to all the citizens of the Oley Valley basin who desired a progressive and dynamic civilization as our community entered the 19th Century, developing the Oley Academy for higher education on the heels of Berks County’s Kutztown Normal School.
The several public one room school houses serving the rural Oley Valley school District in the 19th Century were operated efficiently, according to Reverend P.C. Croll, the Oley Valley historian who wrote about the Oley Valley in 1926, keeping track of elementary education prior to consolidation of School Districts in Berks County in the 20th Century. With the exception of the village of Friedensburg, our rural one-room schools kept youth in their agricultural element living in a successful agrarian culture.
Richard L.T. Orth is assistant director of the American Folklife Institute in Kutztown.
