Dressed in a long skirt and a floral blouse fastened with a blue brooch, teacher and program coordinator Karen Allison takes her place behind a podium at the front of the class at the Bloomfield Schoolhouse. A longtime math teacher, the 1883 one-room schoolhouse may seem like a far cry from the colleges she taught at while living in Kansas.
But Allison has a connection to the historic schoolhouse even she didn’t know when she began teaching there in 2007.
“Both my grandfather on my mother’s side and my grandmother on my father’s were teachers who taught in one-room schoolhouses,” Allison said. “My grandfather taught in Pratt County, Kansas, and I couldn’t believe it but I actually have a picture of him and his class in the year 1898, which is the year of course that we pretend that we’re teaching here.”
Allison has been showing fourth-graders what Pilot Point’s Bloomfield Schoolhouse was like in 1898 for seven years. Originally from Kansas, she relocated to Pilot Point in 1997 to be nearer to her children and grandchildren after her husband passed away.
“I had basically retired from teaching to become a full-time grandmother because my grandchildren had just started arriving,” Allison said. “I did spend a lot of time in the early years with my family.”
Prior to her move, Allison taught post-secondary mathematics at Emporia University and Pratt Community College, both located in Kansas. A self-proclaimed lover of education, she holds a master of science in both education and math and grew most accustomed to teaching college algebra.
Now finding herself retired and living in Texas, Allison got involved with Pilot Point’s burgeoning Main Street program around 2004. It was then she first got acquainted with the Bloomfield Schoolhouse and met Nadine Pitzinger, a coordinator and teacher at the school.
“I began working with Nadine and certainly enjoyed it enough that then I moved to come teach too,” Allison said.
“I think so very much of that dear lady. I can’t praise her enough for her efforts.”
Allison learned then about the interesting journey of Bloomfield. The schoolhouse, built in 1883, was originally located approximately five miles northwest of Pilot Point in the Bloomfield community.
The school taught all ages in its single room using only one teacher until it closed in 1929. It remained in the community until 1976 when plans for Lake Ray Roberts materialized on the site of the schoolhouse. The building was relocated before construction began to Denton’s University of North Texas.
There it stayed for almost 20 years until in 1993 it traveled up U.S. 377 to Pilot Point.
“They literally braced the interior and loaded this on a big flatbed trailer,” Allison said.
“They had to take the bell tower off because it couldn’t go under the power lines. It literally came east and up 377 through Aubrey.”
In the fall of 2003, Pilot Point’s Main Street undertook renovations on the building to transform it into a living museum. Elwood Branum worked to brace the floors of the building during those renovations, Allison recalled. Organizers made minimal changes to the interior of the building, which features rows of antique school desks.
“We have pretty much left that unchanged,” Allison said. “We have not refurbished it or done anything like that, we’ve just kind of tried to leave it the way it originally would have been.”
Now Allison takes classes of fourth-graders through a typical day for Bloomfield students in 1898. Schools from Pilot Point, Aubrey, Tioga, Valley View and Denton schedule days to visit Bloomfield and Allison conducts orientations before their arrival. Students and teachers generally arrive in 1898-inspired attire during spring and early summer. Allison says May is usually her busiest month; this year she has nine classes scheduled that month alone.
Honoring a 45-starred American flag, similar to one school children would have saluted in the 1890s, is the centerpiece to the start of a typical Bloomfield day.
Children sit with boys on one side of the room and girls on the other as they work out problems with chalk on a slate, participate in spelling bees, and work out arithmetic problems in competitive “ciphering” matches. A dunce cap and stool waits at the front of the room for an unruly boy, while girls were punished by standing tiptoe at the chalkboard until their teacher allowed them to sit down.
An organ stands on the right side of the room, where Allison plays “My Country tis of Thee” and “Old McDonald” as students sing along. At recess, students play a long-distance game of catch called Annie Over, tug-of-war and hold sack races before cooling off using a wash bin. Lunch is eaten on blankets outdoors in front of a split-rail fence made of wood past students have split themselves.
“I have often said, I could have an eight-hour school day as far as things it would be fun to tell them about,” Allison said. “We just do as much as we can possibly put into the day.”
This article originally appeared in the Pilot Point Post-Signal.
Heather Michelle Tipton 