It’s not often that elementary school students get a hands-on lesson in local history, but that is exactly what’s currently taking place in the sixth grade classroom of Rommelt Elementary teacher Andrew Brown.

After recently teaching local history to his students, Brown went looking for a particular scrapbook that was around when the building was first built. Not finding it in the library, Brown was led to the school’s storage area, where he found a treasure trove of local historical documentation.

“I’m talking early 1900’s, even back in the late 1800’s and it was just sitting there in boxes. It wasn’t organized, it wasn’t sorted, so I thought it’d be a good project if I got all of that stuff out of there, brought it up to the room and have my history classes go through it, organize it, put it together, and kind of save it, because it needs to be saved,” Brown explained.

Not knowing for certain what will happen to the building following the school’s closing at the end of the 2024-25 school year, Brown found it important to preserve these artifacts.

“I want people to be able to see it, if they can, and I want to save the history. And, quite frankly, it’s kind of hands on history. We’re not sitting here reading or watching to learn about it. We’re actually looking at it, we’re touching it, we’re preserving it,” he said.

For Brown, some of the most interesting finds so far have been photos that date back to the early 1900’s and land deeds from the 1870’s and 1880’s, including the original deed for the land Rommelt is built upon.

“We’ve been able to see photos of almost every school that the district had at one point. Some buildings still exist today, like the Clarkson building down by the bridge was a school at one time,” he said.

“We found evidence that there are time capsules in the cornerstones of both Central Elementary and the high school. We have school board meeting minute books that date back to 1887,” Brown said.

Among some of those meeting notes found, was one dated December 8, 1941, a day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It included an insert from the U.S. Civilian Defense Office instructing residents of what to do in the event of an air raid.

“It said ‘don’t come to school, don’t call, take care of yourself. We’ll take care of the kids. Don’t tie up the line. Don’t be on the street.’ So that was interesting to kind of tie in with U.S. history as well,” Brown said.

Among the other discoveries the class has made is where the school’s nickname originated.

“You would think, because we’re on a mountain, that’s where it is, but we found out the football team used to play on a field up where Lakeview apartments are. It’s called Mountain Beach, and because they played at Mountain Beach, their nickname became the Mountaineers,” Brown explained.

“My favorite part of the project is probably looking at the photos of the sports teams and the school,” said student Scarlett Hertwig.

She highlighted the Blue and White paper among the most interesting finds, noting that it used to be called Black and Gold.

“My favorite part has to be the fact that we get to go through all this amazing history and preserve it, so that it won’t be lost. And I really liked looking through the school board minute marks, because we found a lot of cool stuff inside them,” offered self-professed history buff and student Conley Killian.

For an age group that typically hasn’t latched onto an educational passion, yet, Brown said his students have been eagerly engaged.

“I think because it’s local and they see things. This building that we’re standing in was built in 1929 as the original High School, and the fact that we’re still in it, 96 years later, they see his name. We’ve seen pictures of the building over the years. They’re pretty excited to do it every day,” he said.

“It’s funny, because you spend years getting out your lesson plans and this was kind of just spur of the moment, like, ‘oh my gosh, look what I found. Hey, we’re dropping what we’re doing, and now we’re doing something different,’ so, it’s been neat to do that, and it’s been something different that not a lot of classes have been able to do,” Brown said.

The project has attracted attention from local historians, one who runs the South Williamsport: the past, the present, the future Facebook page, which he said has received good reception. Brown has also been in touch with the Thomas T. Taber Museum.

“They had taken some photos a number of years ago of graduating classes, and I might see if the curator wants to come in and see if there’s anything that he wants for the museum,” Brown said.

“There’s people that need to see this. It shouldn’t be in a dark room somewhere, just sitting there. People are still around that are in some of these pictures, and they should be shared,” he said.

At this point, Brown hopes to make this research available to the public, but what form that takes is unclear, though, in light of construction going on across the district’s buildings, Brown would like to at least have digging up the time capsules underneath the cornerstones as one consideration.

“We’re just getting to the point where we’re now boxing items up and we have them organized. The kids went through everything, organized them, labeled them, and we put them in boxes, just so that they’re safe, but we haven’t quite figured out what the exact end game is. Just anything to get people to see the items, or at least save them,” he said.