Fulton Pittsburgh School District School Exercise Book

Fulton, Pittsburgh, 1895. Faux cloth over marbled boards with ownership label to upper left corner with school district and compiler information. Measuring 9 x 11.5 inches and comprised of 22 pages of sketches, herbal specimens, and sample essays (all recto). Firmly bound and with some dampstaining to the lower gutter not affecting text. Representing a range of exercises completed by state normal school student Flora Yagle, the book presents researchers with a range of study opportunities, including turn of the century pedagogical practice and curricula as well as genealogical and social history work regarding the family structure, work, and education of first-generation immigrants living on the East Coast.

One of seven children born to German immigrants, Flora Yagle (b. 1887) clearly grew up in a family that emphasized education and upward mobility. Census documents from around the time of her birth and childhood list her father as a foundry worker; and into her adulthood they shift to record him as the general manager of the foundry. Similar ambition was instilled in his children, who are documented in census information as students or unemployed during their childhoods, with work only appearing in their adulthoods. During Flora's youth, she had brothers working as clerks and bookkeepers. By the time of her adulthood, she has become a school clerk while her sister has obtained a position as a librarian.

Part of Flora's training would have been conducted at the Fulton Elementary School located in Pittsburgh's Highland Park. A neighborhood for the rising middle class, Highland Park and its schools were still in their infancy while Flora was in hers; while the residential district had been opened in 1879, the school was founded in 1894, and both intended to provide fresh air, open spaces, and pleasant living to skilled workers and their families who were flocking to Pittsburgh for its work opportunities. Historically, Pennsylvania had been a vanguard for public and progressive education. "In his 1830 address to the state legislature, Governor George Wold championed the cause of universal public education" as a scaffold for "the security and stability of the individual privileges we have inherited from our ancestors" (Explore History). Before the decade was over, "more than 1,000 local school districts under a single statewide system of instruction" had been founded, working to regularize "educational standards, curriculum, and instructional credentials" in tandem with the 1857 Normal School Act which founded "a network of ten state academies to prepare public school teachers" (Explore History).

Flora's generation was a beneficiary of these policies. Her notebook shows a range of work, with creativity and visual arts central to her learning. In addition to pressed floral specimens (likely from the school grounds or her home garden), her book also contains a visual and textual representation of the spectrum of colors in a rainbow; illustrated lotus blossoms with a short essay on the botanical facts and cultural uses of the flower in Egypt; black and white sketches focused on perspective and shading; geometrical figures designed to be cut out and folded (but here present); and figure drawings of children in Victorian clothing much like she and her classmates would wear.



US Census 1890, 1900, 1910, 1920.