The Little Red Schoolhouse...Why Red?

You find countless references to the Little Red Schoolhouse in history, literature and lore, as well as a 1922 song by Billy Jones and Ernest Hare and a 1935 film starring Frank Coghlan, Jr. The reference is vivid, conjuring our image of the typical one-room school, although country schools were often built of logs or brick, or of clapboard siding painted red, white, yellow, or even blue in the case of the Blue School of  Landaff, NH! The question may be asked....why red? One interesting take on the question comes from a book entitled, Requiem for the Little Red Schoolhouse, by Gerald J. Stout. I quote the passages below in the hope that you scout out an edition of his 1987 paperback that is rich in information about the country schoolhouse experience. The book was published by Athol Press.
     Why red? The original pioneer schools, those which were built of hewn logs with cracks plastered with clay, were not painted at all...It was not until men began building houses, barns and schoolhouses of sawed boards, most commonly placed vertically and the joints covered with battens, that they began painting them to give color and protect wood from the ravages of time...Most old-timers of northeastern United States remember from their grandfathers that little red schoolhouses were as common as red barns, at least wherever they chose to paint them at all. Yet by my time, our Evans School was painted white as was the nearby school, White Dove, where my mother went to school back in the 1880's. The red schoolhouse era must go back to about Civil War time or shortly after log buildings were phased out and sawed weatherboard siding came into vogue.
     We have no direct evidence about the red color other than what took place with respect to farm barns, especially in eastern Pennsylvania. In that region the red barn is still common, even on modern farms where board fences and homes, unless made of brick are almost always painted white. In early days there was no scarcity of iron ore even in quite early days and relics of old iron furnaces are preserved in many places of Pennsylvania....When iron ore- or iron oxide- was ground fine, it could be used as pigment generally called venetian red. This was the inexpensive red coloring used in barn paint. One "vehicle" (liquid) into which iron oxide pigment was mixed was none other than buttermilk. The casein served in the same way it does in so-called water based paints of today.
     Eventually the United States obtained its own lead supply (rather than importing it) and the price dropped accordingly so white led (lead oxide) could be used for painting the Cape Cod cottages of New England and farmhouses elsewhere. The most logical reason to explain why in later years schoolhouses came to be painted white rather than red after white paint became cheap is the idea that a schoolhouse should be painted like a house- it didn't seem quite right to paint a school like a barn."

Photo Above: The Redstone School, built 1798, Longfellow's Wayside Inn, Sudbury, MA

Photo Right: The Town House School, 1900, Kennebunkport, ME

Comments

[Lynn Thornton]

At the Jefferson County Historical Society in Watertown, NY they are restoring the Pink Schoolhouse. Originally red, there came a time when the State of NY issued a directive that all schools should be painted white - but as today - the directive came with no money to back it up. As a consequence, the Hamlet Fathers gave the school a coat of whitewash. The school came out pink - and as they decided that they had complied with the letter of the law, if not the spirit, they kept it pink! specially mixing paint to maintain the color in the years that followed.

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