From Unity and Brighton to Oakdale and Brown's Corner, children attended small county neighborhood schoolhouses during horse-and-buggy days. Most of these were sturdy "cookie cutter" structures, built to a common plan. Arline Turner recalls going to class in the early 1920s at the tiny Oakley school at Brown's Corner: "Every morning the bigger boys would cross Colesville Pike (now New Hampshire Avenue) to the neighboring farm, The Highlands, to bring back water for drinking and washing. We sat at double desks, and the teacher would assign work to each grade." In the 1920s came Model-T school buses and centralized schools--and the eclipse of the one-room schoolhouses. The town of Brookeville preserves its old school on North Street.

Education or "useful learning" has always stood high among Quaker values, and Friends schools sprinkled the larger neighborhood. The earliest Quaker school opened in a log cabin in 1797 near the future Meeting House--teacher, Isaac Briggs. During the 1800s, schools taught intermittently in Harewood, Woodlawn, Fair Hill, Drumeldra, Fulford, Stanmore, and Rockland. Many kept boarders; with others, out-of-town pupils roomed in private homes.

Mt. Zion's tiny Grifton School opened in 1876 on Zion Road, three years after Zion resident Hamilton Snowden and others applied to the county for its establishment. In about 1937 it was consolidated into a centralized black school at Laytonsville. The largely black community also had a country store, run by whites and a post office with a black postmaster.