Historical memory is constantly being reframed though images and objects presented as capturing the past. In the USA, the nineteenth-century country or one-room school has come to symbolize an authentic American experience and seen as evidence of the lost pure and simpler time. Central to the work of the rural school was the teacher, and in the nineteenth century, this was almost always the woman teacher. This article explores the work of one woman teacher, Betsey Holsbery, and the ways in which memorials to her help construct a picture of an idyllic and unchanging past in one rural town while ignoring the profound cultural and demographic changes the town underwent.