Edith M. (Hampson) Coon Remembers School Teaching Years in Oak Hill and Meeting Merle Coon
Edith wife of Merle C. Coon (son of Perle A. and Maggie A. Coon)
“Signing a contract to teach in the Oak Hill School in 1927 was certainly the turning point of my 19 years, because there I met Merle. Augusta Plummer, who taught at the Nixon School on Route 8, lived next door to me and my family in Galesburg. She told me there would be a vacancy at the Oak Hill School. We rode on weekends either on the train, or if the roads were O.K., in her Model-T Ford. We were at the depot one Friday afternoon when Merle drove up in his horse-drawn wagon full of milk cans. She introduced us, but that’s all. Neither of us moved closer so there was not much visiting. Nothing came of the meeting until later in the fall when Augusta and I had a box supper to raise money for school needs. I believe we talked a little then.”
This box super was held in the old church in Oak Hill. It had not been used for church services for quite some time, but it was fine for other events. That night the building was crowded with girls and others who had filled a decorated box with super food, or were there to bid on their girlfriend’s boxes. Some of the bidding came through the open windows where the overflow crowd watched. Of course, many knew whose box to bid on and somehow knew about mine and Augusta’s box. They made the bidders pay outrageous prices for those two! Merle did not buy mine.
Aunt Nellie Coon was on the school board and I believe she called Walter Kraizer and another school board member because I didn’t talk with them and was hired at the only school where I applied. Nellie agreed to let me board with her family, and I paid her $1.00 a day. My salary was $100.00 a month so I had $80.00 lovely dollars left. Maybe people remember prices at that time and know that $80.00 a month was a good wage. Nellie’s husband, Ernie Coon, died early in 1928 so she had a farm sale and moved to Elmwood. This meant I had to find another home. Merle’s Grandma Coon (Martha) took me in and I stayed there until I contracted diphtheria. My Galesburg doctor insisted that I live where I could have a warm bedroom so Jay and Ethel McCoy agreed to board me and I stayed there the rest of the second year I taught in Oak Hill.
Grandma Coon was a little whirlwind of a Grandma and she was very good to me. She baked on Saturdays and she always put out the pies, cakes, or other lunch food and would urge me to take more than I needed. Cassius Coon (“Uncle Cash”-Oscar’s brother) lived with her at the time. He was very quiet and exceedingly neat in his person. I though his white hair and mustache were great. I’ll always remember that he lived sorghum molasses and poured it all over his plate of food, not only at breakfast. Merle’s memories of his Grandma Coon included her feeding his brother or sisters and himself cake or pie, but only after some chores like bringing in firewood or shelling peas were finished.
I had some smart kids in my class Juanita Hasselbacher, Alice Shane, Merle’s brother Perle, Jr. and John Maher, Sr. were a few. They succeeded in the spite of my ignorance of primary teaching. I stayed at the Oak Hill school two years, but in spite of not wanting to change I was not hired for a third year. The school board felt that two years was long enough. With students in the same schoolroom for eight years, they felt a different teacher would be more effective after two years-maybe they were right. They were also aware that a long-term teacher could gain tenure, limiting their discretion. I hated to leave Oak Hill and closeness to Merle.
More about Edith Hampson Coon
She was born in 1908 and started her first teaching job in Oak Hill in 1927 when she was only 19. After her two years at Oak Hill she moved to Knox County for two years. She married Merle Coon in 1931 and lived mostly in counties north of Peoria County. She stopped teaching to raise six children and returned to teaching at Logan School from 1956 until she retired in 1972.
Thank you to Wayne Coon for this information from "The Coon Family History: the descendants of Oscar and Martha Brandt Coon in Peoria County, Illinois from 1880 to 1996
A teacher in the Oak Hill School in the 1920:
Diary and Reminiscences of Edith Hampson Coon
Written by David Coon from his mother’s diary
A century ago many children in the rural areas of Peoria County received their elementary education in one-room schoolhouses. Within a mile or so from our farm home of the 1940s-50s were two schools that had survived from among a larger number of once-vibrant, one-room schools across the county.
The first of these was the Radley School located a mile and a half south of Brimfield on the
Northwest corner of the intersection of the present day Brimfield and Claybaugh Roads. Four of the six children in our family attended Radley School until it closed in 1947. In its final year as a school, Radley had only a handful of students (from four families with only three surnames among them). The building subsequently was renovated into a house, which remained occupied for many years.
The second school is the main subject of this narrative. The Oak Hill School survived a few years longer-into the 1960s-before being consolidated into the Elmwood School District. The building stood on a site on the west side of the Oak Hill Cemetery Road near the junction with Illinois Route 8. It was a one-story wood building with a small belfry over the doorway and a large cast-iron stove in the single classroom. The outdoor toilets were privies located behind the school. In contrast to the Radley School and two others nearby-the Nixon School, a little more than a mile east, and the Southport School, a mile and a half west of Oak Hill-which were remodeled into homes or community building, the Oak Hill School was torn down in the 1960, a decade after it closed, and it only surviving remnant is the cast-iron bell, which was salvaged and relocated to our family’s home farm east of Oak Hill and which is now in the possession of the Elmwood Historical Society.
The teacher in the Oak Hill School during the terms 1927-8 and 1928-9 was Edith Hampson, later Edith Coon. A resident of Galesburg, Edith graduated at 17 from Galesburg High in 1925 and attended Knox College for two years. Starting in January 1928 she kept a daily diary, and many years later she wrote a memoir, both of which provide information about the life of a rural teacher and the rhythms of a one-room in the 1920s.
Edith learned about the opening at Oak Hill from a friend whose family lived next-door in Galesburg. Augusta Plummer, later Augusta Wolford, was teaching at the Nixon School-east of Oak Hill just of Rout 8 on the present McIntyre Road-and the two young women rode the train regularly between Oak Hill and their family homes in Galesburg. Presumable Mrs. Plummer put Ms. Hampson in contact with the Oak Hill school directors, and in the late spring of 1927 Edith was hired to teach, beginning in September, for eight months at$100 per month. It is unlikely she had ever been to Oak Hill before signing her contract; her family did not own a car, and except for Augusta Plummer she knew no one in the community.
Located 17 miles west of Peoria that community in the 1920 was a village of about a core of families surrounded by numerous farms. It had a post office (which survived into the 1950s), a commercial elevator, grocery store, garage and gas station, and depot of the Chicago Burlington & Quincy Railroad (commonly called the “Q “) , which handled both passengers and freight. Only a handful of individuals were salaried workers in town: the teacher was the only employee of the School District 127. Though small, Oak Hill was a typical rural community in which, it has been said, “people knew about it when you were born and cared about it when you died.” Signing a contract to teach made Edith a part of the community to an extent she could hardly have foreseen.
Probably one of the first things Edith arranged was housing with the Oak Hill family of Ernest and Nellie Schenk Coon (Nellie Coon, a school director, had interviewed and recommended hiring her), paying a dollar a day for room and board. Because she went home to Galesburg by train every weekend-her father worked for the “Q” and family members could travel free on passes-Edith was thrilled to be able to clear more than three-quarters of her monthly salary to help out her parents and her younger sister, who was too young at age 18 in 1927 to qualify for a certificate and had to spend a year as an unpaid apprentice teacher.
Tragically, Ernie Coon died of a ruptured appendix January 12,1928, and Nellie decided to sell the family’s farm equipment and livestock and move with their two sons to Elmwood. Edith then boarded with Martha Brant Coon, Ernest’s mother, for the remainder of that year and the beginning of the next, 1928-9, until she fell ill with diphtheria and had to go home to Galesburg for treatment and quarantine for two weeks in November 1928. Returning to school after her convalescence, she heeded her doctor’s advice and took up boarding with Oak Hill residents Jay and Ethel McCoy, whose home had a furnace.
Walking was the most common way students and the teacher got around. From the village and neighboring farms, children from Harltey, McCoy, Maher, Harding, Shane, Rynearson, DeVries, and Coon families, among others, walked to and from school. Of course, there were no school buses, and few automobiles –(students who went on to high school rode the train to Elmwood and back). Because of their relative isolation, rural families were among the first to buy cars and trucks in the 1920: but, not surprisingly, privately owned autos proliferated faster than publicly-financed, paved roads; most roads were not even graveled, making travel especially problematic in winter and spring. Few people today remember the time county road were nearly impassable because of deep mud when frozen ground thawed and spring rains came. Even improved road roads did not make for comfortable travel, for many cars of that era had no heaters (or to put it another way, they had year round air conditioning). Edith’s diary contains many references to the poor roads and bone-chilling cold of winter driving.
Schoolhouses could be equally uncomfortable, especially in winter. For example, in January 2, 1928-the first day of school following the holidays- Edith sent the kids home because she couldn’t get the building warm enough to hold classes (on another January morning when she arrived the inside temperature was 32 degrees). One of her duties was to fire the large heating stove in the front of the room. She wrote that doing so was hard for her (she had never stoked the furnace at home) and that she soon hired one of the older boys (presumable a seventh- or eight-grader) to open the school door and fix the fire before she arrived in the mooring. After school she assumed the duty of janitor, carrying out the ashes and sweeping the oiled floor.
School started at 9 a.m.; she never mentions a standard dismissal time, but it was probably 4 p.m. Oddly, the record is silent with reference to ringing the bell, but it likely pealed to announce the start of the school day. If lessons and tests were completed Edith had the discretion to send the kids home early, as she did on several occasions. She wrote that she a dispute with a parent mom in January 1928 about half-hour noons, but it is not clear what the standard was. Besides the bell, nowhere does she mention food or lunchtime at school, either hers or her students’. Certainly, some “townies” walked the few minutes it took to get home at noon (she and her sister had done so throughout their years of school Galesburg), while farm kids brought lunch buckets and ate at school. [In truth, the noon meal for decades to come was referred as dinner, while that in the evening called supper; so, properly, kids brought dinner pails to school.)
One-room, single-teacher rural schools were different from today’s schools, for if the teacher was ill, there was no school. The school closed for the first two weeks of November 1928 when Edith was recuperating from diphtheria (and everyone who had been in contact with her-including all of the children-had to receive anti-toxin shots). In January 1929, she wrote that she would have sent kids home, as she was ill, but was too sick to walk home and finished the day, knowing that she would have an after-school ride. Playground supervisor was another role, although apparently, Edith did not play outdoors with the kids at recess: in her third year of teaching, after leaving Oak Hill, she mentions she played outdoor games with the childr3een, “something new for me.”
The school year ran for eight months, from after Labor Day to Early May. Grading periods were quarterly with the semester ending during the second week in January. Entries in Edith’s diary mention quarterly and semester testing and grading, followed by report forms which had to be approved by one of the school directors. Other major events on the school calendar included an entertainment, or program, before Christmas and an end-of-year program and school picnic in May. In April 1928, she mentions taking the eight-graders to visit Elmwood High, which most would attend.
Teaching in a school with no principal or other staff was challenging, but for Edith it was doubly so. She was only 19 years old when she stared, she had around 30 students that year (22 the second year) ranging from the first to the eighth grades (including a few teenage boys taller than she), and Know College had offered one of the pedagogy courses or supervised teaching opportunities required today to earn a state teaching certificate. ) Then, students who had completed two years of college and who had taken basic liberal arts courses qualified to a credential.) “I had no idea what to do first,” she wrote. “Fortunately, it was the practice to combine lessons for say the third and fourth grades or skip a whole grade to be studied the next year. In that way the number of lessons was lessened.” Edith tapped older students like Hazel Coon to tutor younger ones with lessons and manifested her own enthusiasm for learning to encourage her pupils.
Occasionally, students would move into the school district, adding a new grade level to her lesson preparations, as happed in February 1928, and the number in a particular grad level varied annually. When school started in September 1928, Edith had 6 first-graders among her 22 students. She wrote, “the first graders were my special problem; I didn’t know how or where to start with them. I cut out a picture of an apple and posted it on paper have a big, red [letter] ‘A’. That seemed a logical way to start. I had some smart kids, and they succeeded in spite of my [insufficient] knowledge of primary teaching.” Years later after completing more than twenty years in the classroom, she observed wryly that she had “held forth in all her ignorance in the Oak Hill School.”
While she had little or no trouble motivating and working with older students, Edith did on occasion have to tame younger boys: “ I really didn’t know how to cope with boys who were used to doing as they pleased and who had evidently been bosses at home and at school,” she recalled. On one occasion she paddled a young boy, but she preferred persuasion to implant norms of schoolhouse behavior. In a small community like Oak Hill, parents knew what was expected at school and were inclined to give the teacher their full support. The kids knew that if they misbehaved at school, they would hear about it at home.
Significantly, Edith became engaged in the spring of her first year at Oak hill to Merle Coon, the son of one of the school directors and an older brother to four of her pupils, giving her a standing in the community that was quite different from her initial status as the teacher who went home to Galesburg every weekend. Revealingly, her diary entry Wednesday, May 9, 1928 stated :”Visited school with Augusta [Plummer, the teacher at Nixon School] this morning, then went to Peoria for prized for (our two schools’) picnic. Came home on the ‘four’ [a reference to the train schedule], that is to Oak Hill.” Already Edith was beginning to think of Oak Hill and Merle’s familial household, where she spent many happy hours, as a second “home.”
Edith moved on to teach for two years in rural Knox County schools-at Etherly School, south of Victoria in 1929-30, followed by a year at Finley School, north of Oneida, both one-teacher schools. Having taught for four years, Edith and Merle married in 1931. Two decades later, after the youngest of her six children was well started in school, she returned to teach a year in the Oak Hill School in 1954-55, and then beginning in September, 1956, she taught seventh- and eight-graders for 16 years at the Logan School, in Eden, west of Hanna City, subsequently closed and consolidated into the Farmington School District. But by then gone were the years begin teacher, principal and custodian; the Eden School had central heating, indoor plumbing and a staff of teachers!
Much to her disappointment, she was not hired for a third term. She remembered my years later: “ The school board felt that two years was long enough. With students in the same school room for eight years, they felt a different teacher would be more effective after two years-maybe they were right. They were also aware that a long-term teacher could gain tenure, limiting their discretion.” Some evident supporting her view is found in a lost of teachers who taught between 1883 and 1920 in th nearby Southport school ,in a history of that community by Edith Trouth Shoff and Raymond and John Troth [Elmwood Historical Society, 1982]. Twenty-three teachers are listed through that 38-year period, with only two of them teaching more than two consecutive terms-and after 1900 none did so. Still, not being rehired was a blow remembered decades later: “I hated to leave Oak Hill and the closeness to Merle.” Edith’s last day of teaching in Oak Hill was Monday, May 13,1929. The next day she went over to the school in the afternoon and “finished everything.” She was just two weeks past her 21st birthday.
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Edith Hampson Coon and Merle Coon
