Carpenter-Dodge School Bus, 1939

This bus carried rural children to the Martinsburg, Indiana school in the 1940s. Busing enabled children to attend consolidated schools, which were larger than one-room schools and had better curricula, teachers, and facilities. All-steel school buses like this one were safer than earlier school buses, which had wooden bodies. The paint color, double deep orange, was common at the time, but yellow later became the standard color for school buses. This body was built by Carpenter Body Works of Mitchell, Indiana in 1936 and later was attached to a 1939 Dodge chassis.