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LEWISTOWN -- At the Hoopes School, Sandy Deadmon has found a way to explain 19th-century classroom technology to children raised on touchscreens. She hands them a slate and tells them, "Here's your iPad."
Then comes the chalk, which serves as the keyboard. The eraser, she explains, is the delete button. It usually takes only a moment for the comparison to work. Children begin writing. They look around the one-room schoolhouse, built in 1873, and start asking questions about a school with no cafeteria or auditorium, no indoor plumbing, and no bus waiting outside.
"They like having the chance to go back in time," Deadmon said. "It's different because they are hooked on technology, and when they come in, you don't see them on their phones. They're actually looking."
For a little while on Sunday, the phones stayed quiet and history had their attention.
That was part of Sunday's Museum Day at two Mifflin County Historical Society locations: the Hoopes School on Long Lane and the McCoy House Museum in Lewistown. Both opened Sunday, giving visitors a chance to see pieces of the county's past and, in some cases, recognize something from their own.
Deadmon, co-chair of the Hoopes School, said visitors arrive for one of two reasons. Some have a parent or grandparent who attended the school. Others want to know what a one-room schoolhouse looked like.
What they find often surprises children accustomed to separate classrooms and the conveniences of a modern school. Hoopes once held pupils in grades one through eight. When the school closed in 1958, it housed first- and second-grade students.
The building tells the rest of the story. Bathrooms were outside. There was no running water. A coal furnace supplied the heat. Children walked to school and had chores once they arrived.
"I hope they understand it was hard for a teacher to have that many grades," Deadmon said. "I hope they appreciate that we still have that history, that you can go back in time, and you can see what it was like to be in a one-room schoolhouse."
When she gives tours to Cub Scouts and other groups, Deadmon sometimes recreates a day in the life of 1873. She gives them geography, history, and math lessons. One group even asked for an indoor recess so members could learn what children might have done when they couldn't go outside.
The school also brings back memories that have lasted for decades. Deadmon recalled an elderly woman who had attended Hoopes and still remembered another student dipping her pigtail into an inkwell decades earlier.
Deadmon teased her about still being upset.
"Yes, that was my hair in the inkwell," the woman replied. "Do you know how hard it is to get ink out of your hair?"
At the McCoy House Museum, local history waited in photographs, bottles, toys and other objects left behind by people who lived and worked in Mifflin County.
Dee Miller, co-chair at McCoy House, said visitors Sunday spent time with several newer exhibits, including an America 250 display assembled by Mifflin County Historical Society President Forest Fisher.
Another exhibit tells the story of Edwin Eby, a Lewistown man associated with Wisto, a tonic sold as a medicinal product. The display includes Wisto bottles and a shot glass used to administer it. Miller said the exhibit draws interest partly because visitors often don't know Wisto had local roots.
There is also a display devoted to Mifflin County dairies, with photographs, bottles, and other reminders of the county's dairy history.
"Local history is very important," Miller said. "People will come through here and make a comment, 'Wow, you have a lot of local history,' and there are bits and pieces that are unique to their interests."
That element of recognition runs throughout McCoy House. Visitors encounter toys and household objects that cause them to stop and remember. Someone sees an item a grandmother once owned. Someone else recognizes something from childhood. Other objects reveal local connections only after someone explains their story.
"Some of the things are just older things that trigger people's memories," Miller said.
Among the objects are Hower baseball and softball bats, made locally and now valuable enough that Miller, who attends auctions, has seen them command high prices.
The museum also displays a large dollhouse built by the mother of Lewistown Mayor Deb Bargo. Miller said the historical society hopes eventually to record Bargo discussing it so visitors can hear the story behind the object instead of seeing only the object itself.
That's where small museums earn their keep. A bottle gains meaning when somebody explains who filled it; an old school desk changes when a former pupil walks through the door and remembers where she sat.
Miller said visitors often remark on how little local history they learned in school. McCoy House tries to fill some of those gaps with exhibits on local products, businesses and people, along with photographs, toys and handmade objects.
Deadmon remembers a different experience. When she was in fifth grade, her class took a bus trip to local historical sites, including Chief Logan Springs, Dorcas Buchanan's grave, and canal locks. The trip sparked an interest in local history that has stayed with her.
That may be the simplest case for Museum Day and the volunteers who keep McCoy House and Hoopes School open to the public. The past doesn't always announce itself. It may sit inside a glass case or hang in an old photograph. At Hoopes School, it can be a slate handed to a child who has spent a lifetime tapping a screen.
And sometimes, after all these years, it is still a pigtail dipped in an inkwell.