The role of nostalgia has been identified by those interested in the unique impact of one-room schoolhouses on historical memory and present-day fascination with the structures. Most notably, educational historian Jonathan Zimmerman explored the issue in "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (2009). Zimmerman does well to parse the foundations of little red schoolhouse nostalgia and sentimentalism historically, and his work's end is where this essay begins. This essay hopes to complicate and illuminate the nostalgia that motivates interest in American one-room schoolhouses as relic objects and devotion to the schoolhouse as an American national icon.