Posters Spread the Word

by Susan Zehnder, Education Director

The Chemung County Historical Society is sponsoring a COVID19 Awareness Poster Contest for area students. Posters are due online by June 1^st and more details can be found on our Facebook page or this link at Poster Contest.

Our contest is open to all Chemung County students enrolled in public, private or homeschooled classes ranging from Kindergarten through 12^th grade. We’ve lined up a committee of local celebrities to judge the entries, and the posters they select will be put together as part of a CCHS online exhibit everyone can see. The overall winning poster will be professionally printed and distributed to schools and public buildings for display, and to remind us of good health practices. Our project is supported by a grant from the Arts Council and we thank them. Please share this contest information with any students you know.

Why Posters? Throughout history, posters have been an effective and eye-catching way for people to get their messages out. Early posters in America can be traced back to the late 18^th century and were mainly used for advertising. Most were lithographic prints created with a printing technique that uses a flat treated surface, often a stone. To make a print, the surface is treated to attract or repel ink in order to create the desired image. The word Lithography is derived from two ancient Greek words - stone or lithos and writing or graphy. This process was a big improvement over earlier printing practices, however it remained slow and labor-intensive because each image color required a new surface. By the end of the 19^th century printers had improved the process and could now create a rainbow of colors by only using three printing surfaces. Large-format printing became easier, cheaper, and more reliable.

Artists quickly adopted the process to create memorable posters. Design became more important and artists like Henri de Toulouse Lautrec used lithography to create distinctive posters we still recognize today.

His poster of dancer Jane Avril plays up her dramatic flair using that great swooping hat and ribbon snaking down her dress.

Posters were often bold, colorful and used image as much as text to get their message across. Not only used in advertising, they were often used to influence public opinion. As life moved faster and the 20^th century world headed towards war, posters advertised or promoted specific issues like this example from our collection. 

Dressed in an American flag, this farmer spreads victory across the land. While some posters promoted greater public knowledge and were based on facts, others were biased sharing very narrow viewpoints. These functioned as propaganda attempting to push false information or ideas. Either way, posters were an effective way using both image and text to spread messages to as many people as possible.

Poster contests don't span the same history. Locally, they show up in the Star-Gazette mid-20th century. In 1949 the Montour Falls School advertised a contest for 5th through 8th grade students to create posters on the Bill of Rights. Other contests and topics over the years were sponsored by the Civil Defense auxiliary guild, Family Doctors Preventative Health, Muscular Dystrophy, Red Cross preparedness, an anniversary of women's voting, fire safety, and racial equity.  

Posters can be serious, clever, funny, subtle or bold. Humor has made its inevitable dent in the COVID19 situation, with posters from the so-named ‘Coronavirus Tourism Bureau’ a clever hack by talented California graphic designer Jennifer Baer. She's made staying at home look exotic.

The world as we knew it before COVID19 has changed. The lives of our students have been changed forever. We want to see what Chemung County students have to say, we believe their voices are important for us to hear.

Encourage any students you know to participate and spread the word!
(For another blog on posters, see our blog Selling the War )

Hopkins Street School Fire

By Rachel Dworkin, archivist

On the morning of Sunday, April 5, 1959, George and Ellen Henley of 741 Hopkins Street in Southport woke up early to do laundry. Glancing next door, he noticed a red glow coming from the basement of the Hopkins St. School and immediately telephone for the fire department. By the time they arrived shortly after 5 am, the entire north end of the school was engulfed in flames.  

Hopkins St. School was first opened in 1928 to alleviate overcrowding in other Southport schools. The two-story brick schoolhouse had eleven regular classrooms, a laboratory, industrial arts room, home economics room, combination gym and auditorium, and administrative offices. Not one room escaped the fire undamaged.   

Hopkin's Street School

The fire began in the kindergarten in the basement, gutting the classroom before racing up a dumb waiter shaft and open stairway onto the first floor. Flames ate their way through the laboratory and a section of the gymnasium. Although firemen were able to get control of the blaze before it made it to the upper story, every room in the building had smoke or water damage. All of the desks and books in the kindergarten were completely destroyed and much of the material elsewhere were made unusable. 

Basement kindergarten classroom, before & after the fire.

There was one thing which was saved: the flag! As firefighters worked to control the blaze, 14-year-old Dean Pappas waited anxiously behind the firetrucks. It was his job each day to raise and lower the school’s flags. As soon as the firefighters gave the okay, he ran into the building to retrieve the American flag as well as the school’s safety flag. Both were smoke damaged, but salvageable. Dean made the papers.

Dean Pappas with the rescued flags.

The former student who put me on to the story claimed that the fire was caused by arson, but I could find no evidence of that in the papers. It was thought to be electrical in nature. Interestingly enough, the school had recently been evaluated for risk by fire and insurance inspectors. In their report, which had been presented on March 24^th, they urged the school board to install fire doors in the stairwells to slow the progress of fire between floors. The Board of Education never got a chance to act on their incredibly prescient recommendations.

The fire exacerbated the overcrowding in the city’s schools. Three-hundred and fifty students were displaced. They were sent to Hardy School at Lyon and Perine Streets. In order to accommodate the extra children, the school schedule was arranged so Hardy School students attended class from 8:15am to 12:15, while the Hopkins St. students attended from 12:30 to 4:30pm. The Elmira City School District put $127,480 into renovating and expanding the Hopkins St. School. It opened again for students on January 25, 1960.

Principal Martha Kime and Arthur Goodwin, district director of buildings & grounds, inspect the new furniture

One-Room Schoolhouses in Veteran

by Erin Doane, Curator

In 1876, the Town of Veteran had a population of around 2,300 and it had 15 schools. 15!? To modern eyes, that may seem like a lot, but the majority were small, one-room schoolhouses. This was typical of most rural towns in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Nearly all of the students would have to walk to school, so the schoolhouses needed to be close to where they lived. Of the 867 school-age children who lived in Veteran in 1876, 717 were enrolled pupils. There were 12 male teachers and 21 female teachers and a library of 445 volumes shared across the schools.

Students at Veteran School No. 7 in Sullivanville 
with teacher Eugene Bush, c. 1880s

The Town of Veteran Historians have a wonderful collection of photographs and materials related to these early schools. While researching the Towns and Villages of Chemung County: Veteran exhibit, which is on display here at CCHS through July 2018, I got to look through their school files. All the images in this post are from the Veteran Historians’ collection.

Veteran School No. 14, Parrott Road, Sullivanville, January 11, 1932

Teacher Irma Miller with students Mark Cronkrite (11), 
Judd Parrott (9), Margaret Vondracek (10), unidentified dog, 
Robert Hovencamp (11), and Frank Vondracek

The first schoolhouse in the town of Veteran was built in the early 1800s just east of the village of Millport. Simeon Squires served as the first school teacher. By the middle of the century, more schoolhouses had been built in Sullivanville, Pine Valley, and more remote areas of the town.

Veteran School No. 12, Pine Valley

Millport’s famous octagon school was built in 1869. The two-story building had two rooms, one upstairs and one downstairs, where students in grades 1 through 8 were taught. This was one of the only schools that had more than one teacher. In 1888, the two teachers were a husband and wife team who made a combined salary of $750 a year.

Veteran School No. 8, octagon schoolhouse in Millport, late 1800s

The school was torn down in 1930 and replaced with a red brick schoolhouse.

The interiors of the one-room schoolhouses were fairly similar. Typically, there were wooden student desks facing a teacher’s desk and a blackboard in the front of the room. The early schools had no electricity and water had to be brought in from either a well with a pitcher pump outside or from a neighboring home. A wood or coal stove would provide heat for the building in the winter. Since nearly every student walked to school, some were able to go home for lunch. Those who stayed would bring their own lunches or, at some schools, the teacher or parents would provide hot soup for all the students. Outhouses, one for boys and one for girls, were nearby. Some schools had a swing outside or a teeter-totter that students could enjoy at recess.

Interior of Veteran School No. 13, Miller-Skinner School, 
located at Veteran Hill and Sutter Road, 1940s

Most of the schools had students from grades 1 through 8 all in the same room. The teacher would work with one grade at a time but everyone could hear the lessons. Because of that, younger students often learned what their older counterparts were being taught. It was not unusual for students in these one-room schoolhouses to pass tests to skip into higher grades. After 8^th grade, students would go to high school in Horseheads.

Veteran School No. 5 on Middle Road, c. 1920s

One of the neatest things that I found in the Historians’ files were photocopies of yearbooks from Veteran School No. 10 from 1935 and 1936. The homemade yearbooks included class photos, drawings likely made by students, and even a class will. I wonder how many schools produced their own yearbooks like that.

Veteran School No. 10 yearbook cover and page of student photos, 1936

Pages from Veteran School No. 10 yearbook from 1935

Veteran’s rural schools were consolidated with the Horseheads Central School District in 1950 and the days of the one-room schoolhouse came to an end. Several of the schoolhouses were torn down but may more remain as private residences. For more photos and information about Veteran schools visit http://www.townofveteranhistoricalsociety.com/id14.html. To see more photos of students and read stories from those who went to some of the one-room schoolhouses in Veteran visit http://www.townofveteranhistoricalsociety.com/id24.html.

Veteran School No. 1, Terry Hill