The 19th-century schoolhouse looked very different from the one you probably go to. For one thing, the playground was just a field or clearing. For another, the schoolhouse only had one room that held about 30 students comfortably; the whole school was about the same size as one of today's classrooms. It was probably a wooden building, simply built, with a small gable. No running water meant that the toilets were outhouses behind the school. No electricity meant no refrigerator to put your milk in to keep cool in the summer, so like Anne Shirley and her friends, you had to put it in the brook to stay fresh.

The Avonlea school was a whitewashed building low in the eaves and wide in the windows, furnished inside with comfortable substantial old-fashioned desks that opened and shut, and were carved all over their lids with the initials and hieroglyphics of three generations of school children. The schoolhouse was set back from the road and behind it was a dusky fir wood and a brook where all the children put their bottles of milk in the morning to keep cool and sweet until dinner hour.

"Marilla had seen Anne start off to school on the first day of September....

"Anne came home that evening in high spirits.

“'I think I’m going to like school here,' she announced. 'I don’t think much of the master, though....'” (149-50)

Photo of Tryon Consolidated School, 1912.
Public Archives Record Office Acc2667/135

from L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. Boston: L. C. Page, 1908.