And I am firm in my belief that a teacher lives on and on through his students. I will live if my teaching is inspirational, good, and stands firm for good values and character training. Tell me how can good teaching ever die? Good teaching is forever and the teacher is immortal.
—Jesse Stuart, American educator, 1958
Early schoolmasters or “schoolmarms” were required to do more than just teach. They were seen as role models, expected to be at Sunday service without fail, to sing in the church choir, and to teach music lessons in and out of school. They were expected to reach out to needy families, but most importantly, they were expected to maintain the schoolhouse and its grounds, including any cleaning or necessary repairs, even securing wood (or coal) for the all-important stove.
Rules were common, and lists of rules such as those on page 20 were generally agreed upon as part of a teacher’s contract in schools around the West.
List of rules for teachers, circa 1915
Courtesy Siskiyou County Museum
As families pushed west and homesteaded land, women, particularly single women over the age of twenty-five, were encouraged to travel west to teach, and a good number traveled from New England or the East Coast to small schools throughout the West, becoming the inspiration for the image of the old-fashioned schoolmarm on the prairie. Horace Mann, who became secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1837, was a strong proponent of free education and worked for increased funding for public schools. In addition, he pursued better training for teachers. He also considered women to be potentially stronger teachers than their male counterparts. He believed “females are incomparably better teachers for young children than males. . . . Their manners are more mild and gentle, and hence in consonance with the tenderness of childhood.”
However, that opinion did not win out in every area. In 1871, 52 percent of all teachers in Nebraska were men; in Kansas, 47.2 percent were men.
Elsie Petsel Hallock of Ainsworth, Nebraska, wrote in the late 1800s of her choice to start a career in education: “In my hometown, the only highly respectable jobs for girls after they graduated from high school were nursing, teaching or clerking in a store. . . . by the time I’d completed my normal training in high school I [was] still be too young to go into nurse’s training, [but] I was going to be respectable and was going to earn a living. So, I became a teacher.”
For some women, the choice was not always one that turned out exactly as they had hoped. Maude Frazier, a teacher in Nevada, wrote in her memoir Maude Frazier: Nevadan: “It is quite possible that it was never intended by the good Lord that I should be a schoolteacher. At least not so soon after the turn of the Twentieth Century, when they [students] were definitely a distinct species. . . . Early in the 1900s, women teachers suffered most of the restrictions of nuns, with none of the advantages they enjoyed. . . . Nobody defined exactly what a teacher’s place was, but everyone knew she should keep it.”
In rural areas, teachers often had to board with the families served by the local school. Board and room were commonly considered part of the teacher’s salary—which was generally minimal, at best. Elisabeth Langdon Doggett, who was hired in 1913 to teach at Forks of Salmon School in northern California, lived at the old hotel, a building with no inside plumbing or water, for her first year at the school. Her only light was a kerosene lamp. For her second year, she was moved to a small cabin across from the graveyard.
Minnie Smith’s first teaching assignment at Forks of Salmon School
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
In 1915, Miss Irene Yank, who taught at Kenyon School in Shasta County in northern California, boarded at the Baker ranch until winter storms made it impossible to cross the swollen creek to get to the school. Mr. Baker then constructed a small house near the school where his own daughters and Miss Yank could stay during the winter. Later on a larger “teacherage” was built: a small, two-story house with a screened-in porch across the front. A number of teachers used these quarters until they fell into disrepair, especially after some local goats were penned up inside the porch—as a prank. The teacherage was later sold and removed from the premises.
Some teachers in more remote regions had to actually pack in weekly, biweekly, or even monthly to reach their schools. One such schoolteacher was Miss Leona Lewis Bryan. She packed into the Junction School at Somes Bar, Siskiyou County, California, in March 1928. According to the 1989 issue of The Siskiyou Pioneer, Miss Bryan was “led by Ralph and Gil Smith, owners of the pack train, which also delivered the mail. School was operated March through November to accommodate harsh winter weather and was termed ‘Summer School, grades 1–8.’ Leona lived in a small one-room cabin. Her first salary was $1600.00 in 1928.”
Miss Minerva Starritt also had to pack into the mountains and the trip often took more than a day. She wrote that she taught seven years “on the Klamath [River]. . . . I was no stranger to the district. I knew the people and the children.” In 1935, “When school opened in September, I had fifty-two children and all eight grades.”
Most communities stepped in to help teachers get prepared when necessary. Miss Starritt wrote about several who assisted her. For example, they came to help her clear off a hillside to build a playground, and even the state road crew did their part.
One student’s father was an excellent pianist and came to school twice a week in the afternoons to help with music. As she noted, “School programs were important. . . . The entire community far and wide would come to the school plays and games.” One event, however, did not go quite as planned! “We were preparing a gala for Christmas. . . . We had built a stage at the end of the room, six inches off the floor and put candle footlights on the stage. I was wearing a long white polka dot dress. In the middle of the program, I was standing too close to one of the footlights, and my dress caught fire. . . . one of the parents grabbed me and put the fire out. The show went on.”
Vella Munn, successful author of more than forty historical novels, shared what it was like for her mother, a one-room school teacher at Washington Bar School in northern California: “My mother, a single parent, had been hired to teach the 16 to 17 students in the local one-room schoolhouse.”
Washington Bar School, where Vella Munn’s mother and grandmother taught
Courtesy Vella Munn
Washington Bar came into being in 1849 during California’s gold rush. Proof of hydraulic mining still scars several mountainsides while the countless boulders at the river’s edge serve as testament to the Chinese who tried to make a living there. The last time I was in Washington the woman who owned the grocery store told me several miners still pay for their groceries in gold dust. When my family lived there, logging kept the town alive. These days the hotel and recreational opportunities do the same.
At seven I had little interest in what being the only single woman and only college educated person in town was like for Mother. What mattered was that everyone knew my sister and me. . . . Give us a deer trail to follow or tree to climb. There was no such thing as a babysitter, and although at first my sister was too young for school, Mother brought her along.
One day I was sick so we both stayed home, caring for and bedeviling each other. Our little house (it had been a shed before the owner remodeled it so the teacher would have a roof over her head) was heated with a wood stove. My sister tried to pick up the lid for the opening through which wood was fed, and of course, burned herself. I filled the kitchen sink with cold water, and my sister kept her hand in it until Mother got home. We were hoping to keep the mishap to ourselves but my sister’s blistered palm and tears gave her away.
There was no TV or radio reception and no newspapers. The world didn’t concern us. My sister and I were only marginally aware of how drafty the school building was, how cold in winter (Mother was responsible for keeping the wood stove going) or how stuffy it became as the days warmed.
My sister and I lived a life of perpetual present. We believed we’d always live in Washington shut off from the world we cared little about, but it wasn’t to be. After two and a half years there, Mother’s contract wasn’t renewed. We had to leave. Of course we went with her—to Lime Kiln, a nearby farming/ranching community. Again she was the only teacher and taught all eight grades in a single classroom. I graduated from the eighth grade with two others and went off to that scary-big Nevada City high school.
In Rifle Reveille, a weekly newspaper published in Rifle, Colorado, the following was written by a schoolteacher about [her] students in 1896:
The class work is showing more and more those who are earnest about their education, those who have a determined purpose to get all there is to be gotten out of a year’s school work, and those who are careless seemingly, or do not desire to benefit themselves with these opportunities so freely offered. These nice spring days require an effort for boys to tear themselves away from their tops and horseshoes. Yet he who does so conquers in manhood, and yes in womanhood, too, for in the intellectual realm man has found his peer in woman.
For many early schoolteachers, exposing students to new experiences was an important element in their teaching. In 1923, Miss Mary E. Dickey, a teacher at the Kenyon School in Shasta County, California, decided to take her students to the fair in Sacramento, approximately 160 miles south. Parents agreed to the trip, and a group of six adults and nine children set out in September. Mr. Kuney was selected to drive Mr. Bibbens’ open-sided car.
Unimproved roads made travel slow, and when a tire went flat, the children piled out to explore their surroundings while the tire was being repaired. Miss Dickey recognized that every experience on this journey south was likely a new one so she let them explore. One of their discoveries turned out to be a nearby electric railroad line (built in 1910). Hastening to catch up, she was relieved when a fence kept the children from getting too close.
At last, Miss Dickey and her troupe reached Sacramento. While the parents of the younger students found a place to camp for the night, Miss Dickey took the two eldest students—two eighth graders, Elsie Bibbens and Nolan Pehrson—to a private home where she was able to rent rooms.
The next day the students and chaperones went to the fair where they were greeted by an old miner and his donkey. They also toured the state Capitol building and historic Sutter’s Fort. As a graduation present, Miss Dickey took Elsie and Nolan to a restaurant for lunch.
In gratitude, Mrs. Pehrson (in whose home Miss Dickey boarded) deducted $20 from the teacher’s next month’s room and board, which normally cost Miss Dickey $40 a month.
Leslie Ralston shared that her mother, who was born in Broken Bow, Nebraska, spent time with her great aunt who was a schoolteacher at two Nebraska rural schools in the early twentieth century, one at Round Valley and one at Snake Run. “My mom would stay with Aunt Faye for a few months at a time, and she and Aunt Faye would ride to school. Aunt Faye had a big gray horse while Mom had a pony named Buster and one named Trixie. Every day they rode to school—even in the snow—but one year they had a blizzard blow in, and Uncle Loren had to go and look for them with his plow team because the snow got so deep!”
Teachers were fortunate if they had the opportunity to pursue further educational courses or workshops. The rise of various “teachers institutes” was one way that schoolteachers could meet and learn from each other, as well as learn about what was happening in the field of education. But getting to the institutes was not always easy.
In the fall of 1913, six instructors from Weaverville, Trinity County, California, left to attend the annual teachers institute on the coast, in Eureka, California. According to one instructor,
Their transportation was an open five-passenger touring car. At that time there was no road to Eureka down the main Trinity River, only the newly opened Red Bluff road to the coast. The route took them through Douglas City, Hayfork, Peanut, Auto Rest (later, Forest Glen), Cobb, Dinsmores, and Bridgeville.
It took the travelers three days to reach Eureka. The closing event of the institute was a banquet, and they arrived just in time to attend the banquet. Those present stood up and cheered as the teachers entered the dining hall. After eating and signing the attendance roster so that their pay would not be docked, the group had to turn right around and head back to Weaverville via the same tedious route. Thankfully the return trip only took them two days.
The entire trip was marked by 22 blowouts, flats, and breakdowns! While thus halted, those not actually engaged in repair work spread a rug on the ground and played cards. . . . The little party stayed overnight at Bridgeville, but found only two beds available. The three ladies slept in one of the beds, the three men in the other. The latter found it more comfortable to sleep crosswise in their bed.
Everett Conroy, a former student shared a humorous memory from his days at Humbug School in Siskiyou County, California, where his teacher was Mr. Walter Creed. He wrote, “He was quite elderly and would drop off to sleep. One day they took off his glasses and put dots of colored crayon on them.” One can only imagine what happened when Mr. Creed awoke!
Several young people from Scott Valley, California, ride in an open touring car similar to one in which the Weaverville teachers rode to the coast.
Courtesy Jenner Family Collection
Humbug School children
Courtesy Perry Sims
Perhaps Mary Abigail Dodge, who wrote Our Common Schools in 1880, said it best when she wrote the following poem about life as a teacher of the one-room school:
’Twas Saturday night, and a teacher sat
Alone, her task pursuing:
She averaged this and she averaged that
Of all her class were doing.
She reckoned percentage, so many boys,
And so many girls all counted,
And marked all the tardy and absentees,
And to what all the absence amounted.
Names and residence wrote in full,
Over many columns and page;
Yankee, Teutonic, African, Celt,
And averaged all their ages,
The date of admission of every one,
And cases of flagellation,
And prepared a list of the graduates
For the coming examination.
Her weary head sank low on her book,
And her weary heart still lower,
For some of her pupils had little brain
And she could not furnish more.
She slept, she dream; it seemed she died,
And her spirit went to Hades,
And they met her there with a question fair,
“State what the per cent of your grade is.”
Ages had slowly rolled away,
Leaving but partial traces.
And the teacher’s spirit walked one day
In the old familiar places.
A mound of fossilized school reports
Attracted her observation,
As high as the State House Dome, and as wide
As Boston since annexation.
She came to the spot where they buried her bones,
And the ground was well built over,
But laborers digging threw out a skull
Once planted beneath the clover.
A disciple of Galen wandering by,
Paused to look at the diggers,
And plucking the skull up, looked through the eye,
And saw it was lined with figures.
“Just as I thought,” said the young M.D.,
“How easy it is to kill ’em—”
Statistics ossified every fold
Of cerebrum and cerebellum.
“It’s a great curiosity, sure,” said Pat,
“By the bones can you tell the creature?”
“Oh, nothing strange,” said the doctor, “that
Was a nineteenth century teacher.”
Mary Jensen shared that her grandmother, Margaret Ott, who was born on December 29, 1906, in Geddes, South Dakota, attended Chillicothe Ohio Teachers’ College. “The one or possibly two-year program certified her as a teacher in South Dakota for all grade levels, first through twelfth grades. . . . [She] was the first in the Ott family to attend any form of college.”
After attending Teachers’ College, Margaret got a job as the only teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in rural South Dakota. She was about nineteen years old, and it was not unusual for her to have pupils as tall or as old as she.
As the town’s teacher, she lived with her pupils’ families, rotating residences. Her job description included transporting pupils from distant farms and starting the fire each cold morning. She said those extra jobs were harder for her than planning lessons for all twelve grades. One story about Margaret was that on a particularly bad morning her car brakes failed as she drove up to a child’s home. She (car and all) entered the family’s breakfast nook!
Of course, there were moments that required a teacher to respond authoritatively. Oda Brown, who taught in the Midwest near the turn of the century, wrote about a few incidents: “One boy had to write one hundred sentences for making fun of the accent of a classmate’s father who had immigrated from the Azores Islands as he drove his team of horses past the school.”
In another incident, “Major Huey sneaked a lizard into the schoolhouse in his pocket at the end of recess one day and as soon as studies resumed and everyone became quiet, he dropped the squirming reptile down the back of Emily Robert’s dress. She let out a shriek as she jumped straight out of her seat, then started peeling off her clothes as she raced for the door!”
One can only imagine what that teacher said to young Major Huey.
Of course, there were pranks that didn’t always bring about a harsh punishment from the teachers.
Delbert Glavich shared a story in Fiddletown Schoolhouse Memories: “We had skunks in [a] trap and put them under the schoolhouse and she [Miss DeCartret] had to let school out, it stunk so bad. They sent us to the Trustees and they just laughed at us. ‘You guys know better than that. Don’t do it next time. Get out of here!’” And, Delbert also wrote, “We tipped the girls’ toilet over a lot of times on Halloween!”
Lester E. Newton taught at the Rocky Mountain School in Humboldt County, California, from late August 1936 through May of 1938. He wrote, “There were about twenty students enrolled each year, but there was quite a turnover during the year because of parents leaving to work at jobs in other areas and new parents moving into any available homes . . . Over one-half of the students were cousins.”
He continued, “During my first term, the opening day of deer season was on a Friday. After lunch on Thursday, two school board members and the husband of the third board member came in and announced that school was to be dismissed [that day] at 1:30, so that those who wanted to go hunting [could] leave.”
Several decades later, Jeri Christopher, who now lives in Nevada, wrote about her first year of teaching in an isolated rural school in Oregon: “As a first-year teacher in the 1980s, I found myself on the threshold of a one-room schoolhouse and a treasured experience in eastern Oregon. I was to be the teacher of seven little ‘buckaroo’ kids. It had been a year since the school had had a certified teacher; the last one had quit during the previous year, and she had been replaced by a local ranch girl.”
She described her encounter with her new charges, the oldest of whom was a twelve-year-old boy who promptly informed her that “our last teacher started crying and smoking cigarettes. . . . What are you gonna do?”
This “buckaroo” was “closely shadowed by his blonde-haired, meek and mild sister, a second grader. And she was being trailed by a spirited, curly-headed plump little kindergarten girl . . . also a kindergarten girl arrived by car, brought in by her mama from an outlying ranch. The last two were my own two sons, a second grader and a four year old . . . [and] of course, I can’t forget our faithful friend, Brownie, who settled himself on our front porch and barked each day at 3:00, reminding us to go home because school had been over for half an hour.”
As Jeri came to learn, “the only one who knew the alphabet was my own son,” but she was determined to tackle this and other curriculum problems. For example, for her social studies lessons, she found “stored away in the back of a dark, dusty, forgotten closet, an old set of maps. Each day we would put the maps on the floor and gather ’round. Being a history buff, and being guided by the progression of the maps, I told them stories of the past.” The kids quickly began to appreciate the world stretching out in front of them.
In the end, Ms. Christopher stayed for four more “equally great years and many more precious memories!”
In Luther Bryan Clegg’s collection of schoolhouse memories from Texas students and teachers, titled The Empty Schoolhouse, Louise Smith Callan shared, “I taught the older children, and my twin sister Lois taught the younger ones. . . . We had to decide who was going to be the principal. The principal automatically made ten dollars more. I taught the older children so I got the hundred dollars and Lois got the ninety dollars. Then we split that extra ten dollars. Even though I was called principal, we worked together, but I was more or less responsible for getting reports ready and turning them in.” She went on to write, “We had to walk about a mile to school. The older boys built the fires; someone was always there and had the fires built. They did all the extra chores and everything for us. There was a cistern. We drew that water out of there with a bucket. We had a happy time out there.”
Another Texas teacher, Picola Foreman, wrote about her experiences teaching at Salt Creek in Stonewall County, Texas, in 1925.
I was about twenty-four when I taught there. I was expected to live in the community, because I had no other choice. . . . I had about twelve students and stayed with a family that was just a half-mile from school. . . . Most of the kids brought their lunch and hung ’em on the old heater to keep them warm. They all had sausage and biscuits and maybe fruit, if they could afford it. Most of the kids would go barefooted in the spring by choice. They had shoes. They were ranch people. . . . The school building was set on rocks. . . . Those men didn’t close them in around the sides, and lots of times there’d be skunks under there and snakes—rattlesnakes. One time I took the kids down to a little gully for a little picnic, and that very evening, the man I stayed with came back with a big rattler he killed down there. We watched closely, and nobody was ever bitten by a rattler while I was there.
Such were the vagaries of teaching in remote and outlying areas of the West.