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Northern Illinois University

NIU Office of Public Affairs


News Release

Contact: Mark McGowan, NIU Office of Public Affairs
(815) 753-9472

May 4, 2004

Supporters of NIU's One-Room Schoolhouse
plan fundraiser banquet, silent auction June 11

DeKalb — Friends of the Milan Township One-Room Schoolhouse at Northern Illinois University are planning a banquet for Friday, June 11, to celebrate country education and to help build the country school endowment fund.

The banquet and cash bar - from 6 to 11 p.m. in the Regency Room of the Holmes Student Center on the NIU campus in DeKalb - will include a silent auction, featuring such items as African art, antiques, a camping weekend, a ride in an antique airplane, a quilt and four tickets for a 2004 Huskies football game.

Organizers also will honor friends of the country school, including Resource Bank, which funded a video on the history of education in DeKalb County, and the DeKalb County Farm Bureau, which has sent hundreds of farmers to the country school to teach children about agriculture in this area.

Pianist Georgia Price will provide entertainment. Tickets are $50 per person, or $400 per table. For more information, or to make a reservation, call (815) 753-1561.

"Our main goal in raising this endowment is to continue to allow school groups and other visitors to use the country school free of charge," said Lucy Townsend, a professor in the Department of Leadership, Educational and Psychological Foundations and curator of the Blackwell Museum.

"We plan to revise and expand the curriculum and purchase a full wardrobe of costumes for student-teachers. When classrooms of children come to the school, their 'teachers' will have all they need to play their historic roles authentically," Townsend added. "In addition, we should be able to collect and preserve many more artifacts and memories of life in one-room schools."

The endowment will continue the free use of the school, create regular hours for visitors, revise and expand curriculum for school groups and improve and change the informational, educational and promotional materials.

It also will expand and improve the school's presence on the Internet, develop cooperative efforts with other regional museums to better increase and coordinate visits from area schools, provide for more special programs, including guest speakers, and help defray the rising costs of maintenance and upkeep on the building.

The Milan Township District 83 one-room school was dedicated in 1900 on land that was originally part of the Osmund Knutson Tysdal farm. Commonly known as either the Tysdal or Berg school, it replaced an earlier structure that had become too small to handle the student enrollments. The school was 13 miles southwest of DeKalb on the corner of Perry and Tower Roads near the town of Malta.

The schoolhouse was built by local farmers at a cost of $850 and measured 24 by 36 feet. It was heated by a coal-burning furnace in the basement through a single, large register in the classroom floor. There was no indoor plumbing and no water well outside. A neighbor across the road provided drinking water and students used two privies behind the school.

During the school year a solitary teacher provided education for students in grades one through eight in the large, central classroom. Enrollment varied from year to year, but the typical class size was around twenty students or more. Instruction was given in reading, writing, and arithmetic as well as geography, physiology, grammar, U.S. history and drawing.

The school finally closed at the end of the school year in 1942 because of the shrinking number of school-age children in the district.

More than 14 teachers taught in this school, and half of them served just one year. Only one of the teachers was a man. Eight of the women received their teacher preparation at Northern Illinois Normal School or State Teachers College (NIU). Because of the school's connection with NIU and the university's continuing commitment to teacher education, the school was reconstructed on Northern's campus and dedicated Sept. 12, 1999.

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