About 55 members of the Eckhart family gathered at the Kibler one-room schoolhouse on a recent Friday afternoon, the centerpiece of a multiday tour designed to introduce relatives scattered across 10 states to the Pennsylvania Dutch farmland where their ancestors lived, worshipped and went to school.

The reunion was organized by Paul Eckhart, 81, of Florida, who grew up with his five siblings on the family’s dairy farm in Towamensing Township and wanted far-flung relatives to see where their family came from.

“We have a meeting of the Eckhart family,” Eckhart, who taught science in the Palmerton Area School District for three decades, said. “Just to introduce all my family to their family of long ago. My parents are responsible for all 54 of these people who are here today.”

He said that he never attended the Kibler School himself, but the building is nearly indistinguishable from the one-room schools he and his siblings did attend in the township.

“What’s inside is identical to the ones I went to,” Eckhart said. “Some of the things in here, my parents contributed to the school when they set it up as a museum.”

Before arriving at the schoolhouse, the group toured two cemeteries in Trachsville, where Eckhart’s parents, grandparents and other ancestors are buried, along with the Trachsville church where generations of the family were baptized and married.

“That was what built our life,” Eckhart said of the church.

Eckhart said the schoolhouse visit carried extra weight because of how much his parents valued education, even though neither finished high school.

“They only went to the eighth grade,” Eckhart said. “My parents never graduated from any kind of high school, and yet they sent most of us to college. We have doctors, lawyers ... lots of other people in the family with quite an education.”

A genealogist, Eckhart said he has spent about 12 years tracing the family’s history through old photographs of parents, grandparents and even great-great-great-grandparents.

“I’d like them to know who these people were,” Eckhart said.

The schoolhouse tour was led by Roy Christman, a lifelong friend. The two were members of the same 4-H Club, attended the same church and later lived in neighboring apartments as students at Penn State, Eckhart said.

Christman said that nine one-room schools once operated in the township because students had to walk to class.

“They had to be spaced out because all the kids walked to school, and in first grade, you could only walk maybe 2 miles,” Christman said.

By the 1950s, those schools were being phased out. Christman said his father, Eckhart’s father and other local men formed an authority to build a consolidated school, which opened along Route 209 in 1955.

The Kibler schoolhouse itself sat empty and was used as a shed until its owner offered it to the historical society for free if members moved it, Christman said.

“The man who was going to do it for us died about six months before the school was to be moved, and his widow paid for the move,” Christman said.

He said Mennonite crews ultimately relocated the building, which arrived at its current site around 1995.

Christman attended second and third grade in the original schoolhouse and pointed to a class photo on the wall.

“I’m the kid in the front row on the right-hand side,” he said.

He described a one-room classroom where students of multiple grades worked side by side.

“When my dad went, all eight grades were in one room,” Christman said.

By his own school years, students were grouped in clusters of two or three grades. “So you learn to be quiet,” he said.

The curriculum centered on the basics.

“Subjects included arithmetic, reading and penmanship,” Christman said. “We learned cursive. ... If your teacher was musically inclined, you might have more music.”

A wooden paddle still hangs in the schoolhouse, a reminder of how discipline was handled.

“I’ve had older people come in and say, ‘That was the good old days, when you could paddle kids,’ ” Christman said. “No, it wasn’t. It was not the good old days.”

He recalled his sister becoming “so fearful of one of her teachers that she would get stomach aches, so she didn’t have to go to school.”

A wood- and coal-burning stove heated the building unevenly.

“If you sat back there, you roasted,” Christman said. “If you sat up in the front, you froze.”

Christman said one of the few perks of the one-room system was free time to read while other grades recited lessons. By sixth grade, he said, he had worked through two books by World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle from the school’s small library.

He also recalled a teacher who taught students to fish and once dismissed an entire class early on a nice day.

“Boys, it’s a beautiful day. I got to go and make hay,” Christman recalled the teacher saying, telling students they could walk home. “I don’t think you could do that today.”

Many of the artifacts now inside the schoolhouse-turned-museum, including old desks, were saved when area one-room schools closed and their contents were sold at auction, Christman said. He recalled his mother attending one such sale decades ago.

“My mother went to a sale in the ’70s,” Christman said. “I said, ‘Mom, buy that thing. I don’t care how much it costs, I’ll pay for it.’ ”

After the schoolhouse stop, Eckhart said the group planned to visit the Towamensing Cemetery, where another sister and a great-great-grandfather are buried, before heading to Country Junction and the nearby Waldorf estate, owned by his nephew and niece, for dinner.

“We’ll probably build a fire later and sit around and tell stories,” Eckhart said.

The following day, the family planned to gather at the Eckhart homestead, an 1870s farm still owned by relatives.

“My nephew totally refurbished the house, but the outbuildings are still there — the barn, the outhouse, the chicken coops,” Eckhart said.

Eckhart said the family tries to hold a reunion like this roughly every 15 years.

“I hope there are other families out there that can do this too,” Eckhart said. “We’ve been doing this maybe every 15 years or so, and I don’t know if I’ll be around for the next one. So it’s very important to me.”