TEACHING HIRAM HISTORY

When I was teaching third grade in Hiram Ohio near the college, I decided to research the history of this small college town. I went to the college library and checked out some books about the early settlers in this town with only two traffic lights. Then I put them in chapters and with a binder made them into books the size of a printer paper. I drew a picture for each chapter I wrote relating to the chapter.

CHAPTER ONE:  “This is Hiram.” In this chapter I wrote about this beautiful town in Portage County and when the first settlers came and where they came from and how the town grew and how the earliest people were Native Americans, and many were soldiers from the Revolutionary War who were given rights to the land. I named the soldiers who got the rights to the land. I also printed maps out on several pages, too.

When we gathered together to discuss what we found.

CHAPTER TWO: “First Settlers.” I wrote about the first settlers who came and their families with their names. I drew a picture at the top of the page with a settler an oxen plowing a field.

This is the one that turned up well when I snapped a picture.

CHAPTER THREE: I wrote about them settling in, how they built their cabins, clearing the land for planting and before the cabins were done the three-sided shelters they built with a place for a fire in front of it. They were called half-camps. At the bottom half of the last page, I drew a picture of the inside of a cabin with fireplace, a woman working at a spinning wheel, a boy sitting on a bench carving a piece of wood, a girl using a brush to clean sheep’s wool for her mother, and another little girl with a doll. The father is at the table working on something. It was an interesting chapter.

Two students making a rubbing,.

CHAPTER FOUR:  Food of the pioneer, what they grew and the hand mills many of them had to grind their corn and other grains. Sometimes they would take a wagon load of grains to a grain mill in Parkman north of them. At the top of the first page I drew a woman milking a cow sitting on a little stool with a bucket and the cow eating a pile of hay.

CHAPTER FIVE:  Hiram’s first school, and the first post office. In 1813 the first schoolmaster came to Hiram with his family, bought some land and started teaching. People had to pay at least a dollar for each student. The school masters were strict and often used a switch to keep students in order. I wrote quite a bit about those early school houses. I drew a picture of the back of a school master holding a switch facing four little children reading their books.

A student who found who he wrote about.

CHAPTER SIX;   Life in Early Hiram is when I started bringing in the names of early settlers, and what the children would be doing to help their parents and what they would do if they had free time, the games children would play, the weddings that were performed and other things done in those days. I drew a picture at the end of the 3 pages of this chapter of a blacksmith shoeing a horse.

CHAPTER SEVEN;  Hiram Continues to Grow. More people came; a blacksmith, a cooper, a tanner, currier and shoemaker. In 1820 the first store was opened, but there still was no doctor. Most of the inhabitants relied on home remedies like chamomile tea and other things like garlic. It was the job of the housewife to care for the sick and usually a neighbor woman would help out. A family was lucky if all their children lived. The little village organized their own Military Company, too. During the Civil War 74 men went to fight including James A. Garfield who lived in Hiram.

A mother helping some students.

CHAPTER EIGHT;  Religion in Hiram. Almost every community had a church, but like the Amish many met on Sundays in someone’s home. In 1850 The Disciples of Christ chose Hiram to build a school for higher education. They called it Western Reserve Eclectic Institute which later became Hiram College. James A. Garfield taught there, too. Hiram’s religious history wasn’t always good. In 1830 Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigden came to Hiram with a new religion called Latter Day Saints or Mormonism, and they recruited new members. However, a rumor started that they were going to take away people’s land, so one night a dozen men came and dragged Joseph Smith from his home, where he was resting after caring for his sick baby,  and tarred and feathered him. Later friends spent the night scraping the tar and feathers off him. The next morning he still preached to his congregation. I did draw a picture of this but when I took a picture of it it didn't come out well.

CHAPTER NINE;   Early Life of President James A. Garfield. It was about three pages long, and I drew a picture of him with a mule pulling a boat loaded with stuff down the Erie Canal, something he did as a young man.

CHAPTER TEN; Garfield As A Young Man. I drew a picture of him in military uniform on a horse.

Two more checking out a tombstone.

CHAPTER ELEVEN;   James A. Garfield as president. I drew a picture at the top of the chapter of him and his wife, and on the 2^nd page of him being assassinated.

We would do a chapter of this each day, and my students would fill in a paper of questions for each chapter to be graded. Also, I made a list of nine early settlers for my students to choose from to write about in the journals I made that looked like leather booklets using gray plastic for the covers that I sewed down the middle over several or more pages of typewriter size paper, and the children would write in their journal as if they were that person as we went through the history. 

This is the grave stone of Mahitable Loomis.

The last week of school I took my class with parent volunteers to Hiram Cemetery and gave each a clip board with questions to fill in like what kind of stones were the tombstones. Also a line to write an epitaph they thought was interesting. I kept them with the parents in the lower part of the cemetery at first and then we went up to the upper part that had the tombstones of all the settlers I had on the list and we had discussed. I still remember when one my little girl students, who had chosen Mehitable Loomis, a young girl who came to Hiram when she was ten years old. When she found her tall tombstone, she screamed “I’m buried right here, and I had all these children.

I had brought large sheets of paper and black crayons so they could do rubbings of the tombstones of the person they had chosen to be in their journals. After we finished in the graveyard we walked to a local park where other parents had arranged a picnic lunch for us and the kids could play games after they ate lunch.

I would have included more of my drawings but taking pictures of them they didn't show up as well, and I thought seeing my students would be better.

What history classes in school do you remember that you enjoyed?