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The school

Among Iona’s many hills, the schoolhouse hill was a focal point on the community landscape for fully a century. Before the coming of pavement and raised hollows, it was considered quite a steep grade, particularly for travel by horse or older automo- biles. Near its top lay an awkward rocky protrusion that added a generous bump to an already rough roadway.

The school yard was quite insignificant, a mere postage stamp on that hillside and sloping not only east to west but south to north as well. Yet, this limited playground was dear to many generations of pupils and provided rather well for their simple recreation, mainly sleigh riding and snowballing, mountie, hide and seek, tag, blind man’s buff and catch. For ball games, mostly sponge ball, pupils for obvious reasons usually took the liberty of using Roche’s field immediately to the east. The yard was fenced on three sides except along the road. From the north fence the land sloped immediately and steeply down to a beautiful spring which gave birth to a tiny winding stream that eventually joined hands with four sister streams, all emptying into MacPherson’s dam in Eldon. This little spring was a common watering hole for a succession of pupils and was a source of the school’s drinking water when we advanced to having a bucket and dipper or fancy container with paper cups. That spring is well remembered too as a source of raddle, a reddish substance which we used to pull out by hand in gobs. Once dried, this hardened into a colored-chalk kind of thing which had some practical uses. Raddle may have been common to many brooks,