If they lived within two miles, students walked or rode their bikes to school. Mabel Pillsbury was their teacher and she handled all eight grades for many years. And the majority of the pupils came from families who had been in the town for generations.

That’s how it was with the North Grantham one-room school in its final years before it closed for good in June 1967.

Today the building has been repurposed into a residence, a fate that befell hundreds of the Upper Valley’s “district schools” beginning in the final years of the 19th century — that is, if they weren’t simply abandoned and left to rot or burn down or were pulled apart and their beams and boards salvaged for other uses.

Kathleen “Kitty” Forrest Brown and Elaine Mutney Pillsbury attended the North Grantham school and today they can summon up affectionate memories of what it was like when they were pupils there six decades ago. They’re apt to talk more about special activities than the daily classroom routine. They recall a Christmas season program that families and neighbors all attended, a time for honoring soldiers’ graves on Memorial Day and box lunch parties.

“For Memorial Day, we’d gather up lilac blossoms and walk up to the cemetery on Burpee Hill and decorate the veterans’ graves,” Brown recalls. “All eight grades were in our room; there was the woodstove, the outhouse. We caught tadpoles in the swamp down back. There were no buses; we all walked or rode our bikes.”

Pillsbury has a group photo taken inside the classroom that shows the entire enrollment of 13 and one first-grader, herself. Kitty Forrest was an older student, and the teacher tasked her with teaching little Elaine how to write cursive.

“We all were friendly and loved recess when we could play outside, make cabins out of sticks and eat our lunches in the woods behind the school,” Pillsbury says.

Pillsbury’s mom, Barbara Mutney, attended the North Grantham school in the 1940s and a generation later was hired to transport a carload of pupils every day from the far reaches of the town. She looks back on all those experiences with much affection, like many of the one-room products who have them deep in their DNA.

The one-room school that once existed in North Grantham was a noble expression of a radical idea that took root in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1600s and spread north into Colonial New Hampshire by the early 1700s: that every child should learn to read, write and do simple arithmetic and that every town must provide a place where that could happen, supported by taxation.

This was the opposite of the approach back in England and Europe, where the children of the gentry were afforded an education and the masses were left to fend for themselves.

Universal education became a foundational element in the development of American democracy, eventually spreading to every region of the nation.

The number of one-room schools in New Hampshire and Vermont hit its peak about 1885 and then began a long steady decline. Rural areas of both states had begun hemorrhaging population soon after the Civil War, as people moved west to farm on better land or left for towns and cities with industries offering steady employment. Enrollment in schools shrank amid the exodus, and as early as 1890 towns were abandoning schools in remote areas where there were no longer enough kids to fill seats. Hanover, Lyme and Plainfield at one point had 16 one-room schools each, while Hartland, Haverhill and Tunbridge each had at least 20. Norwich Historical Society records show the town had 29 one-room schools at various sites and times. But their numbers would start to drop well before the turn of the 20th century, and the pattern was the same all over the Upper Valley.

Why were there so many schools? The answer is simple: How far could a little first- or second-grader be reasonably expected to walk? Two miles or so was the norm, so buildings were erected to serve the children within that radius. Over the years, many tall tales would be told of how youngsters walked through gigantic snowdrifts to attend school eight or 10 miles away from home, uphill going and coming.

The year the North Grantham school was closed, 1967, only about 15 one-room schools remained in New Hampshire; Vermont had about 20. Today, Vermont has but one, a K-2 located in the Lamoille County village of Elmore. New Hampshire has two K-3s, but an argument can be made that there are three. The two New Hampshire holdouts are in Croydon and Landaff. New Hampton kept a sturdy one-roomer in service as a grade 4 classroom for decades after it built a modern multi-graded consolidated school, but that little building in recent years has been utilized as a space for art and music for the pupils attending the modern brick school next door.

Canterbury, N.H., has a beautifully restored one-room school building in the town center where each spring grade 4 students spend a week studying local and state history. Some communities in both states have turned old schoolhouses into community facilities such as historical society museums and offices for town government.

In their heyday, one-room schools often served as community gathering places for activities such as Christmas parties and wedding receptions. In some locations they were more involved in civic culture than churches, granges or other organizations.

An account of the pending closure of the North Grantham School that appeared in the Valley News in May 1967 quoted the teacher, Arthur Burbank, as having mixed feelings about the looming change. But he said it had been challenging for him due to the disparity in ability between the various pupils and his difficulty in grouping them for special help.

Burbank had had charge of Grantham’s grade 7 and 8 pupils — the rest of the town’s kids attended a two-room school in Grantham that year. The following fall, Grantham sent its seventh and eighth graders to Lebanon’s junior high school, an arrangement that continues today. Lower grades now occupy a modern consolidated school that has been expanded repeatedly as Grantham’s population has soared from 350 in 1967 to nearly 4,000 today thanks to the sprawling Eastman development within its borders.

Most one-room schools never had running water, relying instead on outhouses and earthenware crocks and tin cups. Boys in the upper grades were usually tasked with fetching fuel from the woodshed and chucking it into the firebox.

At the North Grantham School a neighborhood high school girl performed the janitorial duties, though Burbank said he frequently wielded a broom to spruce up dusty floors and every day he patrolled the playground picking up trash.

One-room schools were invariably erected on simple rough stone foundations; few if any ever had a dug cellar. In keeping with common practice of the time, school buildings were often jacked up and moved to new locations. Houses, barns and outbuildings were frequently relocated before impediments like power lines came along. A study in Lyme a few years ago found that of the town’s original 16 one-room schoolhouses, seven had been picked up and moved to new sites during their lifetimes.

It was the automobile and the school bus that hastened the demise of the one-room schoolhouse, of course; without easy transportation, its abandonment would probably have been slower. But in the rural reaches of both New Hampshire and Vermont, the transition was never as fast as reformers wanted, and plenty of them, like Grantham’s, were hanging on well into the Cold War era.

Closings of one-room schools invariably involved controversy, and there remains today a good measure of misty-eyed reverence for the education a person got in such schools back in the day.

Steve Taylor began his educational path at the one-room, grades 1-8 Tracy School in North Cornish. He lives in Meriden and contributes occasionally to the Valley News.