Wood School Desks From Another Era
By Frances O’Cherony Archer
Throughout my years as a student at Peterson school, we sat in the same solid wood desks that were bolted to the wood floors since the school opened in 1925. While several upper floor classrooms had already been updated with more modern-looking desks with shiny chrome legs (that were never stable on the worn and uneven wood floors), most classrooms remained unchanged until the 1970s.
There was a lot of wood incorporated into the interior of Peterson: floors worn smooth by the feet of generations of children, built-in cabinets holding Dick and Jane books and other learning materials, tall window frames that we stared out of dreaming of recess, long poles to open the windows when it was hot, and doors to every room. Much wood trim remains today, but the desks, deeply carved with initials, hearts and dirty words, with inkwells and a groove to hold writing tools, are long gone.
I was in high school when the wooden desks were removed, but my friend Danny Miller who was a couple years younger than me witnessed the removal and wrote about it in his blog:
“When I started eighth grade, the design horror of the early 1970s reared its ugly head and we watched as the cool antique fixtures were taken down and replaced by garish fluorescent lights in a lowered ceiling of white acoustic panels. The low ceilings blocked the top of the windows so the antique wooden poles were thrown away along with the original wooden desks which were pried up from their moorings and replaced with hollow metal desks that echoed throughout the building if you even brushed against them lightly.”
These photos show Peterson classrooms in the 1950s. The rooms looked exactly the same in the 1960s. They probably looked exactly the same in 1925.