OLD SCHOOL HOUSE MAKES HOME FOR COUPLE by Helen M. White of the News Staff Out on Newell’s Run in Newport township of Washington County, Ohio live a married couple who must really have enjoyed their school days---or maybe it was each other. In any event, during those days when Ethel Davis and Edwin Pritchett were absorbing their three R’s in the old one-room White School on Newell’s Run, they formed an attachment to the building. Later, after they were married and when the school building was abandoned and destined for destruction either by wreckers or neglect. Mr. and Mrs. Pritchett purchased the old structure for their home. “This was about 22 years ago,” Mrs. Pritchett said. “We built this addition on and lowered the ceiling in the school house which made room for second store,” she explained, adding that they now have a seven room home. “You can see here where we closed off the front door,” the friendly woman said, pointing to the outlines of the old entrance. “The windows are the same ones that were in the school house.” Mrs. Pritchett said that the huge, hand-cut stones of the foundation are the early, on ones and that this was the second school house built on them. “My mother also went to White’s School. She said that the first building burned when she was just a little girl so young she could barely remember the fire." “This must have been at least 75 years ago as mother is 77, now,” Mrs. Pritchett related. Everett Hanna, 80, of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio a native of Newell’s Run, on a recent visit to the scenes of his childhood told that he and his mother (Nora Smith Hanna born in 1862) had both attended White’s School. “We lived in Milltown when I started to school,” Hanna told. “1 went to Newport School two miles or so each way---for my first two grades, I was in the third grade, or Third Reader, they called it, back then, when I started to White’s School.” Hanna chuckled as he told that back then, the girls sat on one side and the boys on the other in the school. “I always tried to get the back seat so the teacher couldn’t see everything I did,” the old gentleman told. Discipline was strict in school then and no child was ever spoiled by sparing the rod. Hanna told that one time he had looked over and made a face at his sister for which misconduct he was severely punished by the sharp-eyed teacher. His first teacher at White’s School was Miss Susie Dew, Alice Gano was the second Others, he recalled were Florence Lauer, Williard Duff and Sophie Rhomyer. “Williard Duff was really strict and we didn’t get by with anything. He’s the one who put a big knot on my head for making a face at my sister,” Hanna said. Like most boys of his generation, Hanna left school at the end of the 8th grade and went to helping on the farm. However, after leaving the farm, Hanna held some highly technical jobs. “You learn more from life and experience that in school. At least I did,” he said. Hanna discovered that he knew the parents of both Mr. and Mrs. Pritchett and between them, they decided that the first White’s School on Newell’s Run had been built around 1850. Hanna told that he thought the land for the school building had originally been bought from Gus Noland, “Maybe he donated the land, I’m just not sure,” Hanna said. Situated along the picturesque banks of Newell’s Run, this early school, once so alive with eager scrubbed faces of generations now gone, or approaching middle and old age, seem to have been overlooked by historians. No available reference work even mentions it.