A construction crew working on a school in Oklahoma City made a startling discovery earlier this month. Behind the walls at Emerson High School, they found old chalkboards containing class lessons, written in chalk almost a century ago. And chalk drawings, in remarkable condition.
Math teacher Sherry Read’s classroom is a total mess. Light fixtures dangle from the ceiling. The floor has a layer of dust. Down the hallway, workers make a racket in another classroom.
They’re working in what has become an archeological site. But Read doesn’t mind. She’s still amazed that, hiding behind the walls at Emerson High School, workers found lessons from 1917, written on vintage blackboards.
“It’s like touching history, like being a part of what was going on during the day,” Read said. “It’s just remarkable and mysterious, trying to figure out what some of this was.”
The biggest mystery is an old multiplication wheel. It’s a circle with factors on the inside and other numbers on the outside. No one can figure out how it works.
But there’s no mystery about when the lessons were written. A janitor wrote the date on the chalkboards.
It was right after Thanksgiving so there’s a turkey and pilgrim theme in every room. One picture shows a little girl feeding a turkey, dressed in the clothes of the day: a knee-level pink and white dress and stockings. Bright yellow curls frame her face. The picture is intricate, so detailed it must have been drawn by a teacher’s hand.
There’s music and civics lessons. There are rules for keeping clean. And a vocabulary list, written in cursive -- words like “blunder” and “choke.” Also on the board is the word, “whoa,” which would have been an important word in 1917 when many people got around on horse and buggy.
Also on the board, a list of student names frozen in time.
“We’re not sure if that meant they were good students for the day,” Read said. “Or were their names up there because they were bad for the day.”
Jeff Briley with the Oklahoma Historical Society said chalk on a blackboard is not supposed to be permanent media.
“They’re meant to be fleeting,” Briley said. “They’re very charming depictions. Nobody intended these things to be there a hundred years.”
These snapshots are fragile. A simple, misplaced elbow can wipe them away. So Briley said it’s important to secure the rooms, protect chalkboards with Plexiglas, and then control the temperature and light.
“If you make it secure, you make it to where there’s no physical problems, you give it a stable environment, well then you’ll be good perhaps for another one hundred years,” Briley said.
Everyone wants to preserve the blackboards, and Briley said they are too fragile to move. So the old lessons may become part of the modern classrooms.
Architects have a plan to temporarily protect the blackboards with panels, while school officials look for ways to preserve them -- on site.
Teacher Sherry Read said she gets a nice vibe from the chalkboards. She thinks the teachers of 1917 left the lessons for a reason.
“You would have cleaned off your board so you could be ready the next day to come back and teach. So I think they left them on there on purpose to send a message to us, to say, ‘this is what was going on in our time,’” Read said.
Blackboard drawings are the fruit flies of art. They have short lifespans. That’s why the folks at Emerson High are scrambling. They want to preserve these snapshots from a century ago -- for future generations of Oklahoma students.
