Today, many of us will pause to remember the five Amish girls who were murdered a year ago at a one-room schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pa. Television crews will return to the community and dutifully record Amish children walking to their new one-room school, which looks a lot like the one torn down days after the attack.
But the new building has a steel door that locks from the inside. And that makes all the difference.
School shootings are etched onto our collective psyche, each name signifying another moment of unspeakable horror. Littleton, Colo. Jonesboro, Ark. Springfield, Ore. And most recently, of course, Virginia Tech.
But Nickel Mines was different because of its victims. For nearly a century, the Amish have symbolized simple rural living and the security that came with it. When Charles Carl Roberts took those Amish girls' lives, he took away this feeling. The new Amish school represents our effort to reclaim it, to return to an era before such mass murder. But the steel door reminds us that we can't.
Most Americans knew and cared little about the Amish until the 1930s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal revolutionized the nation's countryside. Federal assistance brought electricity, soil conservation and better roads. Children who used to walk to single-classroom buildings now took buses to consolidated schools, where they mixed with a wider array of students and teachers.
New Deal photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans often trained their cameras on dilapidated one-room schools, which epitomized the poverty and parochialism of rural communities. At the same time, Americans worried that the positive aspects of country life -- tranquillity, simplicity, self-reliance -- were passing away.
Enter the Amish, who received their first great burst of nationwide publicity in the late 1930s. Even as the countryside transformed, they upheld its traditions: horses and buggies, oil lamps and one-room schools. Like Laura Ingalls Wilder's series of "Little House" novels, which topped bestseller lists during the same period, the Amish symbolized the sturdy pioneer character that would lead the United States out of the Depression.
So reporters and photographers descended on Amish communities, eager to transmit the lessons from these surviving bastions of rural virtue. Between March 1937 and December 1938, for example, the New York Times ran 17 articles on efforts by Amish parents in East Lampeter, Pa., to save their one-room schools from consolidation. House and Garden and other magazines published photo essays about the Amish, including the inevitable shot of children walking to a one-room schoolhouse.
