In the hills south of Carbondale, a handful of one- and two-room schoolhouses once stood at the crossroads and ridgelines of a deeply rural landscape. There was Pleasant Hill to the north, then Wagner, Rock Springs, Buncombe, Makanda, and Pomona Ridge — each with its own community, its own rhythms, its own way of teaching children to read and reckon in rooms where eight grades shared a single chalkboard. Jane Cox grew up in that world, and in the fall of 1957, she came home to help build something new.

Cox, now in her nineties, is the last living teacher from the opening of Unity Point Consolidated School District. She attended Rock Springs for her first five years, then transferred to Buncombe for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. After graduating from Southern Illinois University in 1952 and teaching junior high in Paris, Illinois, she returned south just as the district was consolidating. She started that September at Pleasant Hill, teaching the combined seventh and eighth graders while the new building was finished. In December 1957, she and her students moved to the campus that still stands today.

Laura Lipe, one of the first students in the consolidated district, remembers first and second grade at Pomona Ridge, then half a year at Wagner before Unity Point opened after Christmas. "Pomona Ridge was strictly one room," she recalls. "We pumped water. We had an outhouse. Everything was very rustic." The teaching was shaped by necessity: older students helped younger ones, fifth graders absorbing seventh-grade lessons simply by being in the room. "We learned mostly from the older kids," Lipe says. "We listened to their lessons."

Cox saw the same thing at Buncombe. "You had the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth in one room," she says. "A fifth grader would learn from those seventh and eighth grade classes. So, there were advantages." Decades before individualized learning became an educational term of art, these rural schools were practicing something close to it. Unity Point Superintendent Dr. Yaa Appiah-McNulty notes that the district still uses multi-age classrooms today, pairing first and second grades — an echo of where it began.

Not everyone welcomed consolidation. Cox speaks plainly about the friction: "It wasn't 100% that people were wanting. There was a lot of back and forth." Families mourned the community identity that had grown up around each little school — the Christmas programs, the end-of-year plays, the sense that the schoolhouse belonged to its neighborhood. Brown School, on Cedar Creek Road, resisted for years before its students finally joined. What helped bring others around, Cox recalls, was a school board thoughtful enough to hire custodians and bus drivers from the very families most resistant to the change. One bus driver, Harold Brewer, "was so against the consolidation" — and, in time, became a believer.

Cox taught seventh grade at Unity Point for 32 years, retiring in 1986. She knew her students' parents, which made discipline almost effortless. She played softball and dodgeball at recess alongside her classes. She was the youngest teacher on staff when she arrived, and Lipe, who sat in her room, says the effect was lasting: "You could ask a thousand kids that she taught, and they'll all say she was their favorite."

Today, Unity Point enrolls around 647 students, and university families from around the world seek out the district for the very diversity that would have been unimaginable in those original one-room schools. "When you go to Unity Point, you get that diversity," Cox says. "And that's a good thing." The land her grandparents once farmed — 320 acres — still holds family. Former students now walk the hallways as teachers. The roads that once led children to six separate little schools now lead to one. "I wouldn't want to live anyplace else," Cox says simply — and it turns out, most of the people who came after her feel the same way.