Under One Roof
Excerpt from How to use this guide

There is no way a traveler's guide such as this can document every one-room schoolhouse dotting America's landscapes. We know many still stand as a reminder of our past. We drive around the country on our great ribbon of highway, and barely notice the buildings we pass.

We know a number of these schoolhouses are still in use today as working schools. In fact our research shows a coming full-circle of sorts; in several communities educators have chosen to return children in a certain grade to spend an academic year in a one-room schoolhouse.

But the schoolhouses included in Under One Roof stand apart from others we may pass on our journeys between here and there: these have been made available for our inspiration and benefit - as travelers. None of the schools in this book remains untouched by time. Many, found to be structurally unsound, were renovated and furnished with the original little desks, pot-bellied stoves, and blackboards.

Others contain furnishings brought in from schoolhouses that were eventually destroyed, have been abandoned, or are being used for other purposes. All have been restored with much love and care - you'll realize how deep these feelings go as you read the stories of these schoolhouses and their caretakers. ...

... All of the entries included in the full-page listings are furnished inside as one-room schools; the smaller listings may be for museums housed in historic schoolhouses, although the contents of the museum may or may not be exclusively schoolhouse furnishings.

Not all the schools included here have just one room, either. Several, for various reasons, were built with more than one room, or more than one floor, or for more than one use. They, too, serve a purpose in history, and we decided to include them in our guide to America's historic schoolhouses.

Finally, this book might have been titled "Little Red," because when we think of America's one-room schoolhouses, our minds tell us these are - or should be - little red schoolhouses. That's not true either. As often as not, the schools were unpainted, painted white, yellow or brown, and were not frame, but were built of logs or stone.