Published: October 10, 2008 02:30 pm            

Looking back at the one room school

The East Silver Grove school house was a few miles west of Pella on old highway 163 on the hill east of the farm owned by Larry and Lillian Terpstra. According to official county statistics in 1878 there were two buildings in the district, one brick and one frame (wood). Two schools were certainly needed that year as there were 101 students enrolled with an average daily attendance of 46. Carol Nollen has found a deed dated Aug. 30, 1888 establishing the East Silver Grove school site on one acre of land owned by Cornelis and Zwaantje Welle.

Was the 1878 school on a different site or was it on the site the Welles deeded 10 years later? We do know that the school closed at the end of the 1920-21 school year. Myron Nollen recalls that he and his brother Elmer were the last two students who attended East Silver before it closed in 1921. Myron says that they wrote with slate and chalk.

Dr. Anthony Hospers in a memoir written before 1974 recalls walking over a mile on dirt road to reach the school house. He states that he wore shoes with buttons that were fastened with a shoe buttoner, long black stockings, shorts pants that were several inches above the knees and a blue shirt with a large flaring collar. He graduated from high school in 1913, attended Central College and taught at the Battle Ridge school for one year before he got the wanderlust and decided to go to Chicago.

Miss Cornelia Hospers was a teacher at East Silver Grove in the years 1911 and 1912. Student Dorothy (Nollen) Van Gorp says about her: “It was through Cornelia’s efforts that I have learned to enjoy poetry and what they called ‘penmanship’ or writing. She always had one line of a good poem or gospel to write on a page. We used notebooks in which we wrote one line of poetry on each page for one class period in writing. We had poems by Longfellow, gospel hymns ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains’, ‘Rock of Ages’, ‘Faith of our Fathers’, and many others, and following through the poem in succeeding pages. I could quote many of them from memory and have never forgotten them.” Miss Hospers also taught at Amsterdam, and Bunker Hill but is probably best remembered as a Sunday School teacher at First Reformed Church for 44 years.

The 1906 picture (above) identified Gertrude Gezel as the teacher. Miss Gezel’s life ended tragically on Aug. 28, 1913 when she, Cornelia De Geus, and Delia King drowned in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. They were at a Y.W.C.A. camp representing Central College. Their bodies were recovered from 120 feet of water in early December of 1913.

Teachers who taught at East Silver Grove included Mary (Marie) Vander Zyl, Delia Rietveld 1894, Delia Rietveld 1895, Henrietta F. W. Gaass 1896, Gertie A Gaass 1897, Anna Barendregt 1898, Sarah Lautenback 1899-1900, Marie Lautenback 1901, Elizabeth Van Nimwegen 1902-03, Elizabeth Gezel 1903-04, Elizabeth Gezel, Gertrude Gezel 1906, Bertha Dykstra 1906-08, Lydia Grundman, Jeannette Hospers 1909, Gertrude Bennink 1910, Cornelia Hospers 1911-12, Hattie Neyenesch 1913-14, Helen Neyenesch 1915, Mrs. A. A. De Bruyn 1916-20.

The next school will be the White Breast School. Call me at 628-4716 if you have original pictures or memories to share.

        

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