I remember a game that we used to play called "Anti-I-Over the woodshed " with a team in front and behind the white woodshed building behind the school.  Also "Pom Pom Pull Away" and "Red Rover" in the school yard. Then there was one of the girls getting her tongue stuck to the pump handle at the well when she was dared to touch the handle with her tongue on a very cold day and it froze to the handle and the teacher had to get her loose.  The only two teachers that I had while there were Lois Galbreath Dornan and later Marie Schultz.  Both were very capable and well liked.   We had a phenomenal library for such a small school due to the interest of those two teachers and two of the school board members, our dad, U-S Crane and Joe Skinner, Sr. who really thought that that was important.

I have fond memories of apple trees when growing up.  Did you know that the farms that my father inherited were known as Crane Fruit Farms while those that Uncle Blakeslee farmed were known as Crane Orchards?  When my brother Richard joined the business with my father, the cold storage  on what had been referred to as "the Old Place"  had lettering on it U S Crane and Son.  That's the farm that had the cherry orchards where we hand-picked sour cherries.  And where, when we had picked our quota, we girls were excused to go swimming.

Now cherries are shaken off the trees onto a cloth on the ground by a tree-shaker. The apple and pear trees were so tall that we were not allowed to go up the tall ladders so the hired men picked those fruits.

When the Peachbelt School "piece" came up, so many memories came flooding back, Lots of "snippets" of beginning school there and attending until graduating from the eighth grade. I was surprised at the number of names and faces I remembered as well as the assortment of incidents.  I'm sure that you have lots of stories you could tell about attending school in town. When I went back a few years ago at the invitation of some people who had bought the school and lived there most of the year, I visited there for several hours and we chatted and then they let me pull the rope to ring the bell in the belfry.  What a treat. They were collecting information on former students and their one-room school experiences  as well as their successes later on. The picture of the whole school population standing beside the small group of elm trees that had grown together so that it resembled a large thick tree brought back some of the memories about the school yard games we played around and behind what we referred to as "The Old Elm Tree". I made the mistake of looking at that material just before bedtime so I had trouble shutting off the memories that were flooding in.  But it was worth it.

I am still searching for a children's book entitled " Along the Erie Towpath " ( I don't know the author ) that I loved because some of our Fenn relatives lived beside the Erie Canal in New York State.