Amish Kids Take Snow Sleds to School

When there is snow on the ground in Northern Ohio, I like to tour the countryside, looking for photographs like this one of a new parochial school on Salt Creek Township Road 601, just south of Fredericksburg, Ohio.  This is a typical Amish schoolhouse, and it seems that new ones are being built each year.  There is an outhouse in the background, and the two-room building sports its plumbing on the outside front left corner, namely a single hand-pump spigot.  Note also the belfry and the chimney for the wood-burning stove.  Then the school has an anteroom, or mudroom, for coats and boots, attached to the front of the single classroom.  This is one of the newer schools in the area.  Its neighbor Leeper School has been there since the nineteen-thirties, and with the Amish population in Holmes County growing as it is, I expect there will someday be still another school nearby.

But have a closer look at the left front corner of the school.  See the sleds?  Right.  The Amish kids take sleds to school when it snows.  Did you ever do that?  Like me, you may have ridden a bicycle to school, but I doubt you took a sled.  There might be twelve to fifteen scholars attending this new school, and there are six sleds left outside in the snow.  So, that’s a good percentage of the children from that neighborhood.  Take a sled to school?  If you were Amish, you wouldn’t think anything of it.