Submitted by Dorothy Heller and Zachary Peelman
Town of Clay
This week’s question: Do you know anything about this picture? It was probably the most well-known local business of its time but after the fire of 1932 it was not able to rebuild. In many ways, it supported a majority of Clay families for many years.
Last week’s answer: Last week’s photo was of the one-room Woodard School in Clay.
An excerpt from the memoir of Marshall Doane, Ph.D (assistant professor and emeritus senior scientist of biophysics, Harvard Medical School), reads:
“In December of 1946, my parents, William and Laura Doane, moved our family from Syracuse to an old farmhouse on Morgan Road, a quarter-mile south of the Buckley Road intersection. Of course, John Glenn Highway didn’t exist at that time. My brother (Gene) and sister (Sylvia) were not yet of school age, but I began my attendance in fourth grade at Woodard School during the first week of January 1947.
“Woodard School was a wood-frame one-room schoolhouse, not counting a small anteroom for hanging up our coats. The structure had a large set of windows on the south-facing wall (towards Liverpool). It had no running water, and was heated by a large coal stove in the front right corner of the room. The ‘bathrooms’ consisted of two privies, one each for the girls and boys, connected to the main room so that we need not venture outside — but they were not directly heated, which led to quick visits during winter days! The longer ‘hallway’ to the boy’s room also led to the coal bin, where boys were responsible for using a coal scuttle to keep the stove supplied.
“There was a well outside the front of the school with a hand pump, and one of the boys would take the white enameled water bucket outside to the well, fill it, and bring it into the back of the room where it resided upon a special shelf, alongside a long-handled dipper and paper cups. An occasional bug in the bucket was not a serious deterrent from drinking the water.
“The ‘library’ consisted of two bookcases — one a standard bookcase, the other a revolving set of shelves that were in the rear right corner of the room, next to the door leading to the girl’s privy. There was an upright piano along the right (north) side of the room and the teacher would occasionally play and we would sing songs that were in songbooks that were handed out.
“Most of us brought our lunches, living too far away from the school to be practical to walk home and back. Some of us would bring cheese sandwiches which we would hold in a long-handled metal-wired grilling device that was made to hold hamburgers, hot dogs etc, over an open fire ‚ but it worked quite well to make a grilled cheese sandwich when inserted into the door of the coal stove and carefully held over the coal fire.
“A rather interesting feature of the location of the school was a small wooded area about 100 yards behind the school in which numerous rocks could be found. These rocks were composed of sedimentary deposits and if carefully struck would quite easily break open and many would then reveal fossils of leaf patterns and tiny shell-bearing creatures that lived in this region thousands of years ago. In later years, I realized that this was a rather novel experience, but at the time we didn’t think that finding these artifacts of the distant past was anything special!
“The athletic facilities — perhaps more accurately termed a limited playground — consisted of two swings, a trapeze bar about four feet above the ground, a jungle gym set of bars, and a pair of teeter-totters. The boys made a very primitive sort of abbreviated baseball diamond in the field behind the school — not officially part of the school grounds. We would play made-up games, such as ‘annie-annie-over,’ which consisted of throwing a ball over the roof of the attached privies that was required by our rules to bounce once on the roof before falling toward the ground on the other side. The ‘opposing team’ had to catch the ball before it hit the ground, but since the ball would appear over the roof without advance notice, it was not as easy as it might appear.
“As the school district became centralized, the higher grade levels were taken by school bus to the Liverpool High School (the A.V. Zogg building). So, beginning with eighth grade I was taken by school bus to Liverpool while my brother and sister remained at Woodard. Eventually, of course, all of the Woodard students were taken by bus to Liverpool.”
Email your guess to [email protected] or leave a message at 315-434-8889 ext. 332 with your guess by noon Friday. If you are the first person to correctly identify an element in the photo before the deadline, your name and guess will appear in next week’s newspaper, along with another History Mystery feature. History Mystery is a joint project of the Star-Review and area historians in Cicero, Clay, Liverpool and North Syracuse.
