The Fresh Air School
By: Louise Pettus
Open air schools sprang up like mushrooms throughout the world in the decade following the opening of the first one in Germany in 1904. Some were designed as “recovery schools” since they were designed for physically weak students, usually malnourished or tubercular.
In 1907 there was one in Providence, Rhode Island. Other large United States cities followed. In the U. S. they were all designed for tubercular children and included lengthy rest periods.
A year earlier, 1906, quite a different type of open air school was opened in Columbia. This one was for physically healthy children and resulted from the belief of its headmistress that physical health is the basis for mental health. It may have been the first open air school in the South.
Columbia’s open air school had a long waiting list from the day it opened. When Annie E. Bonham announced that her private open air school, “Bon Air,” would accept students from age five through high school, conservative, upper-class Columbians did not hesitate to support it.
Bonham, born on an Edgefield County plantation in 1856, was the high-spirited daughter of Milledge Luke Bonham, who commanded the Palmetto Regiment in the Seminole War, was an U. S. Congressman and a South Carolina governor. To clinch his place in South Carolina political life he was one of the first leaders of the Wade Hampton Red Shirt movement. James Bonham, Annie’s uncle, was one of the heroes of the Alamo.
In 1886 when D. B. Johnson organized Winthrop Training School in Columbia, he chose Annie Bonham to train the elementary teachers. She did such superb work that most of the teachers she trained went on to distinguished careers as teacher trainers in colleges and state departments of education across the nation.
Johnson prized Bonham so much that he was extremely disappointed when she chose not to follow him and Winthrop College to Rock Hill. Instead, she opened a private school in Columbia.
When she decided to convert her institution into an open air school, Bonham attached two rooms to her home. One had three sides open with a roof that projected far over the edges to keep out the rain. The second room was glassed on three sides and called “Cuba” because it was sunny and warm. Benches for the more than 100 students were arranged according to grades.
On cold days the children slipped into roomy bags with drawstrings and donned woolen gloves and caps. Weather permitting, every twenty minutes the younger children had a brief romp on the playground. Visitors noted that the bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked students displayed mental alertness and great enthusiasm for their tasks.
Annie Bonham hired the best teachers available for her school and offered and well-rounded, carefully planned curriculum. Using keen judgment, she enriched the usual academic subjects with folk dances, games, gymnastics, art and shop work. Hot lunches were another innovation.
At the time of her death in 1921, tributes to her 45-year teaching career poured in. D. B. Johnson, her former superintendent, wrote: “One of the best and greatest teachers I ever knew.” She was called “original and forceful in all her work,” with a “keen and penetrating mind.” Perhaps the State newspaper in its newspaper eulogy said it best: “She was the good teacher.”
Many of Annie Bonham’s ideas and practices were carried out by others who either heard of or observed the methods of the Bon Air school. Mrs. Hetty Browne taught farm children on the Rock Hill campus of Winthrop with many classes taught out-of-doors or on the spacious porch of the farm house that served as her school. The garden was the center of learning for future farmers and farm wives and the program was endorsed by the U. S. Department of Agriculture.