The Kemp one-room schoolhouse was one of eleven that originally served the Greenwich Township area of northern Berks County, PA. This one is located on Kemp School Road just off of Kunkel Mill Road. I’m still researching this school. It’s in excellent shape and has an electric meter installed making me think it might have been used as a community or township meeting place in later years. The school is a little odd in it’s placement with the entrance facing away from the road and the school being right up against the road. I can’t help but wonder if the current paved road was run behind the school while the original dirt road that serviced the school would have originally run in front of the school. I also wonder what happened to the belfry and bell that has obviously been removed.
Most of the the Greenwich Township schools were consolidated into an official school system in 1944. Most historic One-Room Schools in Pennsylvania closed as a result of consolidation procedures, mostly in the 1950s.
This is the first shot with my new Sigma 10mm F2.8 Fisheye lens. I’ve wanted a fisheye lens for landscape photography for a few years and this 10mm has a nice balance of sharpness and super wide angle without a lot of the lens distortion you find with a lot of fisheye lenses. I shot this as seven bracketed RAW frames at .7 stop increments and then combined them into an HDR with Photomatix Pro and finally, tone mapped that image. One of three one-room schoolhouses that shot on Saturday 8-7-2010 thanks to my Dad who played taxi driver while my leg is still on the mend.
