In the fifth grade at Bridgewater-Fontanelle, Nikki Gruber Donnenwerth was in a class that was given the task of creating an Iowa history project. With the help of her father, Dick Gruber, Donnenwerth decided to create a scale model of a one-room schoolhouse.
Donnenwerth used Summerset No. 8 as her example, a school that once stood 2 miles south of Fontanelle. Those who attended the school say the model is pretty accurate. That model, made in the mid 1990s, has been donated by Donnenwerth’s aunt and uncle, Ray and Sandra Stewart, to the Fontanelle Public Library, where it is now on display.
“I’m not sure if they still do this, but every year when you got to fifth grade you did an Iowa history project. Sometimes people did scrap books, wrote reports or did some visual like we did,” Donnenwerth remembers. “My dad and I decided on a one-room schoolhouse and it was really neat.”
Perhaps one of the neatest facets of doing the project for Donnenwerth was how much she learned about her family’s involvement in education. As it turns out, she’s an educator now herself, teaching English at Hampton-Dumont High School in north central Iowa.
“My grandma was a school cook for many, many years, then my dad became a middle school teacher and married a teacher. My dad’s brother and his wife were also educators and my dad’s sister is a school secretary and she married an educator,” Donnenwerth said. “It definitely runs in the family and it probably got started right about that time in that schoolhouse.”
There are many people still in the area who attended Summerset No. 8. One who has personally gone to the library to see the model is Bruce Jensen of Bridgewater, who graduated from eighth grade in 1949 before he attended high school in Fontanelle.
Jensen remembers playing on the playground each day at noon, the well students could draw water from on the schoolhouse property and the stove that the teacher would fire up each morning before students arrived.
“We had seven or eight grades in that school all at one time and I remember the kids would sit up front and do their recitation. Some of the little kids, it was pretty funny to sit and listen to them rather than sitting and reading your own books,” Jensen said. “Everybody could hear because there were no partitions in there. We also always had a Christmas program and the parents would come in for that. I guess that would be another memory.”
Jensen remembers feeling like he had lost some of the personal attention he received in his one-room schoolhouse education when he began going to town for school.
“We didn’t get the personal attention for school,” Jensen said. “That helped us out on a lot of things and made it easier. It was a one-on-one deal. I came out of there in the eighth grade and had a Mrs. Ila Pickrell [as a teacher] when I was an eighth-grader. You had to take the county test to get into high school. She really worked with us on that to pass it and all four of us [in my class] passed it.”
As sharp as Jensen’s memories are about that old schoolhouse, it seems Donnenwerth and her father matched it in their details of it when they made the model.
“We did everything down to the pink walls — the walls were pink, and that’s exactly how it was. I thought that was so funny,” she said. “Everything was as close to scale as we could get. We had a pencil sharpener in there. I learned a lot about Iowa history and education, but I also learned a lot about my family, which was way cool.”