By Jim Hagarty
This is a very old one-room schoolhouse in a rural setting near Goderich, Ontario. It is similar to the one I attended as a kid except that the one I went to was sided in brick. This one was probably sided in clapboard originally and then eventually covered over in its present-day “insulbrick”, a substance that was similar to asphalt shingles except that it was designed to give the appearance of real brick work. I am grateful this building is still standing. It appears to be situated on a private farm property. Some day it might disappear. The old schoolhouses had two doors – the one on the left entered into the boys’ “cloakroom”, the one on the right, the girls. The school I attended, as did my father and my grandmother before me, has long since been torn down. When the schools were closed in the 1960s and ’70s, they were sold off to individuals and many of them were transformed into homes, a few into businesses.
