PINTO — To the best of Edna Scally’s sons’ knowledge, their mom, who blew out 97 birthday cake candles Sunday, is the only living student who attended the former one-room school in Pinto.

“It was like going to school with a big family,” Edna said Sunday by phone from Hagerstown where she was joined at her birthday celebration by her sons Bob of Manassas, Va., John of Annapolis, Tom of Bedington, W.Va., and Lou, Bill and Dan of Hagerstown.

Edna lived with three sisters and four brothers and her parents on a farm about one mile from the schoolhouse on old Pinto Road.

“I would get up about 6:30 and milk the cows before school,” she said.

Everybody walked to school. “If you look at the old photo you will see that all those kids are wearing boots,” said Bob. “There was a good reason for that.”

“We had double desks,” Edna recalled. “My older sister went to school there at the same time and we were seated together. A neighborhood boy would get there first and make a fire on cold days,” she added, speaking of a potbelly stove that burned both wood and coal. “We got drinking water in a bucket from a well and we all drank out of the same cup.”

Edna, who said Sunday she feels pretty good for being 97, believes she got a fine education. “The teachers came from Frostburg, but on days when there were bad snowstorms they couldn’t make it so mothers of the students who lived closer would watch us. We mostly sang on those days.”

In 1926, when Edna was 14, she said Pinto got on the map with one of the first free bus services for students. “That was a big deal. Maryland was way ahead (of other states),” she said.

On mornings at the farm, oatmeal was usually the breakfast fare. “We’d take a jelly sandwich for lunch and then have a good pot of soup beans and some homemade bread when we got home.”

After seven years in the same school room, Edna Elizabeth (Rephan) Scally went to Greene Street School in Cumberland for grades 8 and 9 and then on to Allegany High School through grade 12.

But it was within the confines of one room in the valley of the North Branch of the Potomac River where she received the bulk of her schooling.

“It was good,” she said. “It was like going to school every day with a bunch of your brothers and sisters.”

Contact Michael A. Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com.