PRESERVED FILMS

From One-Room Schoolhouses (ca. 1935)
Filmmaker: Dr. Karl Myers or Dr. Elmer Myers. Transfer Note: One sequence copied at 18 frames per second from a 16mm print preserved by the West Virginia State Archives. New Music: Martin Marks. Running Time: 1 minute.

What we've labeled One-Room Schoolhouses is a minute-long excerpt from footage taken around 1935 by two medical doctors in rural Barbour County (a hundred miles northeast of Route 60). Dr. Karl Myers and his brother Dr. Elmer Myers may have documented educational facilities, including this schoolhouse, while examining the health of schoolchildren. —Scott Simmon

About the Music
For the brief One-Room Schoolhouses, the quick opening music comes from T.T. Noble's "Children's Dance" (which can be found under "children" in Erno Rapée's Motion Picture Moods [1924]). This soon gives way to "The Schoolhouse and the Flag" (Butterworth, Southwick, ca. 1876), a song once widely distributed but now forgotten. Its message suits the film. The words run: " 'Tis the school-house that stands by the flag; let the nation stand by the school!" —Martin Marks

About the Preservation
The film of Barbour County and its schools was donated by Evangeline Myers Poling (daughter of filmmaker Dr. Karl Myers) and preserved in 1999 through Treasures of American Film Archives funding.