Page From Register Listing Daily Class Activities

This register, along with 14 others, was donated to the Healdsburg Museum by Katherine Clendenen in September, 2005. Clendenen’s mother, Olive Mathews Bell, was the teacher at Pena School from 1933 until 1943, when the school was closed in order to consolidate the students with the Geyserville Elementary School District. Olive Bell was responsible for keeping the school register during her years there. When the school closed, Bell lovingly saved these registers for over 60 years until her recent death.

Olive Mathews Bell, who grew up in Fort Bragg and then studied teaching at the San Jose State Normal School, became familiar with Healdsburg because her roommate in San Jose was a Healdsburg girl - Marie Mothorn. With the help of another Healdsburg family, the Langharts, Olive learned of a teaching vacancy at Pena School in the Dry Creek Valley, for which she applied and was chosen in 1933.  In 1936 she married Walter Bell, a Dry Creek native, whom she met while boarding near the school.

The Pena Schoolhouse

Inside The Pena School

In the first little directory that Mr. Kent [Sonoma County Superintendent] gave me — I counted it up and there were 1,430, total, kids attending school in Sonoma County in one-room schools. They had an average of seventeen per school, but some of them were much smaller. There were eighty-four one-room schools! I taught in the floor of the [Dry Creek] Valley, where there were seven schools…

Every few miles there was a school, because all the kids walked to school. Here are the schools that were in the Valley [refers to a document]: Manzanita, then Lambert was the next one, then Dry Creek, and then the farthest up the valley was Hamilton. Then on the west side was Peña School where I taught. Then Grape School…. On Canyon Road was Canyon School….

Peña School was built in 1889 on land purchased for fifty dollars in gold coin from G. Kimsey Bell.….I taught the last ten years in the [Pena] school. Poor kids — same teacher for ten years, they didn’t have a chance. When they came back to school, the teacher knew who knew their multiplication tables and just where they left off. But they were just like a family. About half of them were from Italian families, and a few of them came to school and didn’t speak a word of English. They learned….

I had twenty-one when I went there. Six first-graders. It was so much fun. Those kids would challenge me…Most of the one-room schools had very few students. That was the amazing thing to me when I came up here to teach school. I had a job in that one-room school, all eight grades. I thought I was back to Abe Lincoln days. I had never been involved in a one-room school. Nothing in my teaching training had anything to do with one-room schools. Peña School seemed so quaintly different with its picturesque bell tower, slate blackboards, an old pump organ still tuneful, a very antique teacher’s desk and chair, the water well with its long-handled pump — and — the boys’ and girls’ "outhouses" on the hill!

The complete interview of Olive Mathews Bell can be viewed on the website of the Winegrowers of Dry Creek Valley at http://www.wdcv.com/oralhis/Bell.html.

Special thanks to Katherine Clendenen who shared the above photographs of Pena School from her family collection.

The above was researched and written by Whitney Hopkins 

For more information about the Museum's collection of historical artifacts, contact the Museum