School papers

The Juniata County countryside, like so many other rural places in the U.S., is dotted with pieces of education’s past. One-room school houses have been turned into homes or sit empty in the middle of farm fields; buildings once housing larger schools are now apartments; and, in the case of the Tuscarora Academy in Academia, the one remaining building of a nineteenth-century academy for boys houses a museum that’s occasionally open.

My collection of papers includes some artifacts from this educational past. Here are three pieces: two souvenirs from the East Waterford Primary School, listing pupils from the 1896-1897 academic year, and an invitation to the commencement exercises of the Tuscarora Academy’s senior class. No year is given on the academy’s commencement invitation, but the date–Friday, March 24–occurred in 1864, 1870, 1881, and 1892. Three students graduated that year.