Lunchtime at one-room school

This is a photograph of four children and a dog having lunch outside a one-room schoolhouse in Ohio. This school was mostly likely built as part of the Works Progress Administration project, a government office that hired unemployed Americans to work on various government projects from April 8, 1935, to June 30, 1943. In the first six months that the WPA existed, more than 173,000 Ohioans, including both men and women, found employment through this program. More than 1,500 unemployed teachers in Ohio found work through the WPA teaching illiterate adults how to read. In twelve separate counties, primarily in southeastern Ohio, more than twenty-five percent of families had at least one member working for the WPA during the late 1930s. By the end of 1938, these various workers had built or improved 12, 300 miles of roads and streets and constructed 636 public buildings, several hundred bridges, hundreds of athletic fields, and five fish hatcheries. WPA employees made improvements to thousands of more buildings, roads, and parks within Ohio. WPA artists also painted a number of murals in Ohio post offices