[Donald Miller, ag teacher at New Holland-Middletown High School for 28 years, displays plaque naming him an Honorary American Farmer by the National FFA Association in 1988. This is one of the highest awards given to an adult by the FFA.]

He will be one of many area residents with ties to New Holland who will be attending the village’s 125th anniversary celebration the weekend of Sept. 29 and 30 and Oct. 1.

Miller grew up on a farm near Burtonview and went to grades one through seven there at Burtonview Grade School, then a one-room school. The school had from 16 to 18 students and one teacher. The teacher had to do all the work, fire the furnace, clean up the building and teach all eight grades, he recalls.

"By the time you got to the fifth or sixth grade, you knew everything, because you had to listen to all the other classes recite," he says. The one-room school didn’t even have indoor plumbing; the students had to go outdoors and use old-fashioned outhouses, he recalls.

He went to eighth grade at New Holland Grade School, then on to New Holland Community High School. "There were about 60 kids in high school in my time. We had one English teacher, one history teacher, a coach who taught math and physics, a math teacher, a typing and business teacher, an ag teacher who also taught science, a home economics teacher, and the principal, who also taught history and civics." When he graduated from New Holland High School in 1955, there were 18 in his class, one of the larger classes in the school.

"The class of 1955 has had a class reunion every year since we graduated," he says. "About eight or 10 of us come. I think we’re the only class that meets every year."

What he learned in a one-room rural school and a small-town high school was good enough to get him into the University of Illinois, where he had to take examinations for three days straight before he was accepted. He graduated with a master’s degree in agriculture.

"I believe there are advantages to small schools," he says. "To say the little schools are not doing a good job is just not true."

The principal at New Holland died in the spring of 1960, when Miller was completing his work at Illinois. "The ag teacher took over as principal, and then they needed an ag teacher. They thought of me, and I started teaching in the fall of 1960."

In 1961 New Holland consolidated with Middletown High School, and students from both towns came to the high school in New Holland. That school had been built in 1931, after a fire destroyed the downtown building where high school classes had been before. The new building was dedicated in January of 1932. It originally had six classrooms, but in1955 an addition was built, giving it a farm shop, music room and bus garage.

In 1973 a new elementary school building was completed near the high school, and students walked over there for science classes, band and chorus, and lunch at the new cafeteria, Miller remembers.

In its heyday, the New Holland-Middletown High School had from 125 to 130 students, and Miller taught "some pretty good-sized ag classes. We were active in FFA and in judging ag contests in Section 14 of the state. We had about 12 different schools competing. This included schools in Logan, Sangamon and Menard counties, along with one school from Cass County.

"We always entered the judging contests, grain, beef, swine, sheep and land use judging. We usually won about two contests a year, and once we won the land use judging contest 18 years in a row."

It wasn’t an easy contest. A backhoe would dig a hole in the ground six feet deep, and the students had to get down in the hole, study the soil, make a soil profile and then map out a management plan for the land.

"Even when I started teaching I knew of lot of my students wouldn’t be farming," Miller continues. "But most of them would be involved in ag in some way, maybe as an implement dealer or a seed corn dealer. An ag background in high school could help them get good jobs."

In 1988 New Holland-Middletown consolidated with Lincoln Community High School, and Miller went along to teach ag and some science classes. He retired in 1995 and lives in Lincoln.

"I really enjoyed it," he says of his teaching career. "The kids were great kids. I still see some of them and they still call me "Mr. Miller."

"I say, ‘It’s Don now,’ but they say, "No, it’s always Mr. Miller.’"