I was looking at some things at your site and noticed a picture that I can ID some of the people. It is the Tisdale School picture. The one I will send you is a duplicate with the names that I know. The children are my father Bill (William McKinley) and his brothers and sisters. They are the children of Ida and Edgar Rudolph Feaster. They lived a mile east and 2 south of the Tisdale School on Silver Creek at the confluence of Snake Creek. Dad was born in 1896 and was 11 at the time of the picture. His oldest brother, (Silas) Guy was not pictured and may have left school by the time of this picture. This school burned. Edgar helped work on building the original school. It was replaced by the brick school.

As a parent, Dad planned and worked on building the cellar near the brick school after the Udall tornado. For years there had been a multi-stall horse barn with 4 or 5 stalls at the north edge of the school yard and the hay for the horses which people rode to school, was brought once a week by the parents and placed above the stalls in the rafters. I rode my horse occasionally but not every day. We would carry water or take them at least once at noon recess to the well. The outhouses were at the northeast and southeast corners of the yard. The baseball field was south of the school and used often. The well was east of the school and we took turns carrying in a bucket of water daily for the children who drank from a common long handled dipper ...until the mid fifties.

There was a coal bin in the basement of that brick school. On rainy days we loved to go down there and play. It was converted during one of my eight years there from coal to gas heat. One of the bins had coal in it and the large one did not. We played hide and seek but there was another game we played that the teacher did not know about. The older boys swore they had dug a tunnel from the larger coal bin to the boys bathroom so they could go out there and smoke and the teacher would never see them. My girlfriend and I crawled the perimeter of the coal bin in the dark multiple times looking for the entrance to their tunnel. I was leary of looking by myself so I speared her on by assuring her again and again that I was positive that it was there. Since it was pitch dark, we would just have to feel for it. Of course each time we looked, we came upstairs from recess black and covered with coal dust. Occasionally we would ask the older boys for a more detalailed clue as to exactly where we might find that elusive hole.The older girls searched once and learned fast, but it took me years to give up on finding it and was never totally convinced that the boys' story might somehow not be true.
--Donna Martin