From the distance of a hundred and fifty years, the settlement of the West in the United States looks like another inevitable step in the Manifest Destiny of the growing country. But many factors played into the spread of citizens into the territories west of the Mississippi River. And those factors also influenced the educational systems of the West.
Perhaps the greatest influencer of the earliest waves of settlement was the discovery of gold in California after the Mexican-American War opened up that territory for American settlement. Probably the second greatest influencer in the development of the West, however, was the Homestead Act of 1862, signed into law by President Lincoln in the early years of the Civil War. Prior to the Homestead Act, anyone hoping to purchase lands in the West owned by the federal government had to buy at least 320 acres of the unsettled land, at $1.25 per acre. According to the National Archives, “The investment needed to purchase these large plots and the massive amount of physical labor required to clear the land for agriculture were often insurmountable obstacles.”
Clinton Custer and team plow, Oro Fino, California
Courtesy Clint and Pat Custer
A homestead bill that would eliminate much of the land speculation and make the development of homesteads more affordable had been promoted and passed by the House of Representatives in 1858 but was defeated by the Senate. In 1859, a second homestead bill passed both houses but was vetoed by President James Buchanan. Buchanan, often considered one of America’s worst presidents, believed that states and territories had a right to determine if they would allow slavery. He was not about to upset the balance of power between slave and non-slave states, therefore he was not about to promote settlement of the West since new anti-slavery states would elevate the issue dramatically.
In response to Buchanan’s laissez-faire attitude, in 1860, Lincoln and his newly formed Republican Party platform included a plank advocating homestead legislation, and when it passed in 1862, the language approved by the thirty-seventh Congress allowed:
That any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States, and who has never borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies, shall, from and after the first January, eighteen hundred and sixty-three, be entitled to enter one quarter section or a less quantity of unappropriated public lands, upon which said person may have filed a preemption claim, or which may, at the time the application is made, be subject to preemption at one dollar and twenty-five cents, or less, per acre; or eighty acres or less of such unappropriated lands, at two dollars and fifty cents per acre, to be located in a body, in conformity to the legal subdivisions of the public lands, and after the same shall have been surveyed: Provided, That any person owning and residing on land may, under the provisions of this act, enter other land lying contiguous to his or her said land, which shall not, with the land so already owned and occupied, exceed in the aggregate one hundred and sixty acres.
The legislation had a huge impact. By the end of the Civil War, fifteen thousand homestead claims had been filed, and more settlement followed in the postwar years. Women made a number of the homestead claims. Eventually, 1.6 million claims were approved. The Homestead Act transformed America’s landscape and introduced settlement from the plains to the coastal regions of America. The Act remained in effect for more than one hundred years; the final claim, filed for 80 acres in Alaska, was approved in 1988.
Immigration also impacted the settlement of the West as eastern cities and states became more crowded and new arrivals came, seeking economic opportunity. Over a million Irish immigrants arrived in the United States in the 1840s because of the potato famine. And from 1870 to 1890, nearly sixteen million immigrants flooded into the United States. Immigrants settled at least fifty-eight counties in Kansas. In 1890, in North Dakota, 43 percent of the population was foreign-born. And in Wyoming, one out of seven arrivals was an immigrant. By 1900, 47.6 percent of the total population in eleven western states was composed of immigrants.
Alaska
Discussion regarding the purchase of Alaska from Russia paralleled the westward expansion of the United States. In 1864–67, the Western Union Telegraph Expedition to Alaska brought attention to the region. In a speech Charles Sumner gave to the United States Senate, he stated that Russia “wished to strip herself of all outlying possessions as Napoleon had stripped himself of Louisiana, in order to gather her strength for her struggle with England for the Control of Asia.”
Many would wonder why Alaska, but as the tide of nationalism and expansionism took hold, the decision to purchase Alaska was probably inevitable. The United States purchased the territory in 1867.
When gold was discovered in the Canadian Klondike in 1897, the rush was on. Prospectors arrived by the tens of thousands and these men were responsible for blazing trails into the interior.
Miners and their family in Alaska, circa 1903
Courtesy Steve Sloan
In the wake of the gold rush came a more serious look at the Alaskan frontier. According to the census, by 1929, the population of Alaska was 59,278, but that figure was actually based on estimates of the Native populations by priests and missionaries and local records. Their full numbers will probably never be known.
According to the 1930 census, of the 28,640 whites in Alaska, only 10,990 had been born in the United States, of American parents; either the mother or father, or both, of approximately 7,470 had been foreign born, and more than 10,000 were born in foreign countries themselves; 6,359 of these were naturalized American citizens. Finally, Alaskan residents who were either immigrants or the children of immigrants totaled 17,650. Most of these came from Canada or northern Europe, e.g., Norway, Sweden, Germany, England, and Finland.
Life was hard for immigrant children, and an education was not easy to obtain.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
As described in the 1930 census, Alaska’s Native population was divided into four groups, each inhabiting a different geographic region. The “original tribe of the southeast was considered to be the Tlingit,” and they numbered 4,462. The second group included the Athapascan (or Tinneh) Indians and totaled 4,935.
The Aleuts—who are related to the Eskimos but are different in language and customs—made up the third group; however, they were combined with the Eskimos (the fourth group). Together their population totaled about 19,028 in 1930. Broken down, the Eskimos numbered about fifteen thousand and the Aleuts about four thousand.
Clearly Alaska became a melting pot of various groups. And since they were spread out across landscapes that were not easy to cross or settle, educating the children was a difficult task.
In 1915, Anchorage opened its first public school in its Pioneer Hall building (later known as Pioneer School). There were four teachers hired and over a hundred students enrolled. In 1917, a second school was established to handle the increasing student population, which totaled some 206 students.
It wasn’t until 1939 that Anchorage opened its first high school, in addition to an elementary school and a 570-seat auditorium. It was funded by a $101,250 grant from the federal government and by a voter-approved bond. The school, designed by well-known architects Naramore & Naramore, was so well constructed it survived the 1964 Alaska earthquake with no damage.
More important, the “Native question” was, as in other parts of the West, subject to the prevailing attitudes of the time as well as changing and confusing federal regulations and policies.
In 2003, Cheryl Easley, PhD, and others conducted research as part of a “Voices of our Elders” project, funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services through the Administration on Aging. As outlined in her paper Boarding School: Historical Trauma among Alaska’s Native People, “The educational policies that took place in Alaska in the late 1800s and early 1900s were a continuation of US government policy that began in 1879 as a result of western expansion in the continental United States. These new policies focused on treaty-making that put Indians on reserves and educated Indian children in boarding schools.”
Without question, the popular attitude of the time was that “it was easier to control an Indian with a hoe in his hand rather than with him on a horse, waving a rifle.” Removing Indian children from their homes and installing them in boarding schools made it easier to assimilate them into the culture. Harsh, strict rules regarding language and other customs were enforced, often through corporal punishment.
While a number of missionary “day” schools had been introduced in Alaska in the decades prior to acquisition by the United States, boarding schools sponsored by the government were purported to offer the “best means” of bringing Native people into alignment with the general population.
One of the first schools built for the Tlingit people near Sitka was at Wrangell in 1877. In its first years, it was a mission and a day school. In 1878 it became a girls’ school and remained open until 1889.
John G. Broday opened the Presbyterian Mission School in 1878, but in 1884 it was reopened as the first Sitka Industrial Training School; it taught carpentry, machinery courses, and carving for boys and later, courses for girls were introduced. Into the 1900s, the Mission School, along with the Roman Catholic Mission of the Holy Cross and a school at the reserve at Metlakatla, were the only schools open to Native children.
In 1884, the US Congress passed the Organic Act, requiring the Interior Department to provide education for all children in Alaska, without regard to race. Funding for schools increased from $25,000 to $40,000, but providing an education still proved difficult in the rugged regions of the territory.
Eskimo school children, early 1900s
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Churches stepped in to open schools for Native students, while non-Native schools were established in Sitka, Juneau, and Douglas. Teachers were paid only $800 a year, less than teachers in the continental states.
In 1886, in his address to the US Congress, Sheldon Jackson, the General Agent of Education for Alaska, declared, “They [Native Alaskans] are savages, and with the exception of those in Southern Alaska, have not had civilizing, educational, or religious advantages. . . . They need to be taught both the law of God and the law of the land.”
As the onslaught of thousands of prospectors overwhelmed the territory—many bringing their families—boomtowns sprang up, and many of them did build schools, but most of these eventually closed or were abandoned as miners moved on.
One of the most significant results of the gold rush was the introduction and spread of diseases that killed thousands of Native Alaskans, a period of time that has since been referred to as the time of “great deaths.” The people died from cholera, diphtheria, influenza, smallpox, measles, venereal diseases, tuberculosis, and alcoholism.
As disease swept over the frozen frontier, thousands of Native children were orphaned or left homeless. In response, missionaries, as well as the government, established orphanages. At the same time, missionary schools were being replaced by boarding schools to be run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Finally, the 1884 Organic Act of Alaska was revised in 1912 to provide education to whites and Natives of “mixed blood who lead a civilized life in parts of the territory outside incorporated areas.”
According to Jim La Belle’s master’s thesis, prepared for Dr. Easley, the former dean of the College of Health and Social Welfare at the University of Alaska Anchorage, “Many children were sent to places foreign to them. In many cases, kids from the plains were sent to mountainous and forest regions of the State. The Wrangell Institute Boarding School, deep in the heart of the Southeast Panhandle, was one such place. . . . Many would not understand why their parents would let them go. . . . The authorities came and loaded thousands of children from hundreds of villages across Alaska onto boats, skiffs, dog teams, and sleds for shipment to rural centers for redeployment to larger gathering places like Fairbanks and Anchorage. About 400 would go to Wrangell.”
As part of the educational policy, children had to be taken away in order to discourage family visits. Again, Easley pointed out, “A cadre of BIA employees, Native and non-Native alike, would meet the aircraft coming in from rural centers. . . . From a roster, the employees would determine the names of the children (some as young as five years of age) and their village of origin and then tether them together by small pieces of rope. Sometimes a rope held a few kids, other times 10 to 15.”
In 1932, the Wrangell Institute Boarding School was established on Wrangell Island in the Alaskan Panhandle. Wrangell had originally been founded by the Russians and was one of the oldest non-Native settlements in Alaska. The school remained in operation from 1932 to 1975.
Much has been written about the abuses and mistreatment of the Native children at Wrangell. Many returned home confused and bitter, unable to make the adjustment back to their family and culture. According to Easley, “The moral impacts of those bygone educational policies are evident today. There are many boarding school-era students who have faced a loss of cultural identity, language, and tradition. . . . Since the mid-1970s, these individuals have made up the high percentages of alcohol-fueled statistics. . . . They have been living on the margins of both societies, caught between the Native world and the Western world.”
Recovery for many of these individuals has come about slowly. In 1993, the Episcopal Church became involved with Indigenous Healing, as addressed by Archbishop Michael Peers of the Anglican Church of Canada. He wrote, “I accept and confess before God and you, our failures in the residential schools. We failed you. We failed ourselves. We failed God. I am sorry more than I can say: that we were a part of a system which took you and your children from home and family. . . that we tried to remake you in our image. . . . That in our schools so many were abused. On behalf of the Anglican Church of Canada, I offer our apology.”
Alaska still has a number of successful one- or two-room schools. Labouchere Bay School in Labouchere Bay is located on Prince of Wales Island, the fourth largest island in the United States and the ninety-seventh largest island in the world. The island is the traditional home of the Tlingit, but miners arrived in the late nineteenth century and settled there, and, as logging became the island’s dominant industry, the population grew and so did the need to educate the young.
In spite of its many failures, without these important outlying rural schools, Alaska’s student population would suffer severely.
Arizona
The land that would become the Grand Canyon State in 1912 would not be widely settled until after World War II, but due to the discovery of copper in the state, the territory, which was originally part of New Mexico and became a separate territory in 1863, had sparse and transient settlements all over by the end of the nineteenth century.
The first European, Fray Marcos de Niza, had passed through what would become Lochiel, in Santa Cruz County, Arizona, around 1539. Located along the Mexican border, twenty-four miles east of Nogales, it became a mining town in the late nineteenth century. It had three saloons, a bakery, a stable, five stores, a mansion, a butcher shop, and a population of about four hundred people. Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa often crossed the border here to steal cattle before slipping back to Mexico safely.
Today Lochiel is a ghost town, located on private property, but several buildings—including a church, the old U.S. Customs Station, and a one-room schoolhouse and teacherage—are visible from the road. Interestingly, several movies, including Monte Walsh, Oklahoma! and Tom Horn, were filmed here.
Other preserved school buildings can be found around the state, as well. The Strawberry Schoolhouse is the oldest standing schoolhouse in Arizona. It is found in Gila County, in the northwest corner of Arizona. In 1884, settlers living in Strawberry Valley petitioned the county school superintendent for a school. The petition was granted, giving birth to District #33.
Arizona resident and artist Carolyn Sato recalled that the interior of the hand-hewn school was much lovelier than most pioneer schools. “Wainscoting reached from the floor to a height of four feet. Cloth was stretched and nailed above that and wallpaper was glued to the cloth.” In addition, “glass windows were installed, two on the east side and two on the west. They were double-hung and could be raised and lowered. A bell hung over the door on the south side and a wood-burning stove sat in the middle of the room.”
Story has it that a dispute over the school’s proposed location, however, led to an unusual solution: using a rope, cowboys measured the distance between two homesteads, the Hicks-Duncan cabin to the west and the Peach cabin to the east. Halfway between the two they built the one-room log cabin schoolhouse.
After the Strawberry School was closed in 1916, the abandoned structure fell into disrepair. In 1961, it was sold to Fred Eldean, who gave it to the Payson-Pine Chamber of Commerce. Some restoration was done, but then, with the support of the Arizona Historical Society, the Pine/Strawberry Archeological and Historical Society managed to complete the restoration.
Mormon pioneers originally settled Mount Trumbull, Arizona. Mount Trumbull, for which the town was named, is about twelve miles away. The town was also known as “Bundyville,” after one of the town’s families. The town was originally established in 1916, and the current schoolhouse was built in 1922.
A one-room schoolhouse and a number of abandoned buildings plus a few other structures are all that remain of the town. The school was abandoned in the late 1960s, but restoration on some exterior and interior portions has begun.
After Geronimo and his men surrendered to the US Army, residents in and around Skeleton Canyon, Arizona, were eager for a schoolhouse. Geronimo (1829–1908), chief of the Chiricahua Apaches, had led his tribe against Arizona’s white settlers for more than ten years. He surrendered in 1886, and he and his tribe were taken to Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
Geronimo was a leader and medicine man from the Bedonkohe band of the Chiricahua Apache tribe.
WikiMedia Commons
A schoolhouse of sorts opened in 1910, but with the purchase of land, in 1914, from Jane and J. J. Wheeler for $25.00, Apache Elementary School had a permanent home. The school continued to operate for over one hundred years with as few as one or two students or as many as twenty students. After graduating from the eighth grade, students transferred to Douglas, San Simon, or even Animas, New Mexico, to attend high school.
In spite of recent movements to close the school (because there were fewer than the “required” eight students), the parents and residents have fought to keep the school open. Located between the Peloncillo and Chiricahua Mountains, as of 2018, the Apache Elementary School District was one of four remaining one-room districts in Arizona.
The Tubac School, in Pima County, Arizona, was established around 1876–77, after residents petitioned the superintendent of schools for a school. Mr. T. Lillie Mercer was the school’s first schoolmaster, and thirty students were enrolled (including three of his children). The first classes were held at one end of the Otero General Store, and because so many of the children were of Mexican descent, lessons were taught in Spanish and English.
By 1885, there was a schoolhouse, funded by Mr. Sabino Otero, a rancher and prominent citizen. It was an adobe structure with a packed dirt floor. Mrs. Sarah Black was the first teacher. The school grew, in numbers of both pupils and teachers; by the 1890s, there were sometimes as many as 140 students and three instructors. Today, the Tubac School is an immersion school for visiting students and is run by the Tubac Presidio State Historic Park.
The Lehi School, in Mesa, Arizona, was built in 1913 and is the oldest standing school in Mesa today. The Rogers family provided land for the first school in the 1880s. It was a simple one-room adobe structure, but the community outgrew it and a new school was built in 1914. Today the school is also the site of the Mesa Historical Museum.
Native American children all over were taken from their traditional homes—sometimes hundreds of miles from home—to attend boarding schools.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
The Phoenix Indian School was a boarding school supported by the federal government.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
California
The most important event affecting the growth of the western states was the California gold rush of 1848–49. Although most people today have heard of the Mother Lode and the Sierra Nevada mining sites, few realize the scope of the gold rush. The entire northern region of California and southern region of Oregon was opened up on the heels of the forty-niners as thousands flooded San Francisco (then known as Yerba Buena) and Sacramento on the way to the gold-laden rivers and steep mountain slopes. While some miners prospered, most failed, and this propelled them deeper into the Sierra Nevada or north into the rugged Trinity, Siskiyou, and Cascade ranges.
Miners headed into the northern California mountains
Courtesy Bernita L. Tickner Collection
Inducements to sail to California were posted all over the East.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
In July 1846, two years before the first discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, and three years before the raising of the US flag over California, the first Mormon colonists to arrive in Yerba Buena made the journey via a chartered cargo ship, the Brooklyn. The more than two hundred exiled Mormons sought a new home; one hundred of these “Pacific Pilgrims” were children. Because there was little housing available in the city, however, a number of the Mormon families moved south. One group settled at Mission Dolores, the other at Mission Santa Clara. The two schools set up inside rather dilapidated outbuildings found at each location were the first in California to teach in English.
The group that remained in Yerba Buena established a third school. Sam Brannan, a Mormon leader, built a large home in the city, and he donated the back of his lot for the first authentic schoolhouse to be built in what is now California. Classes began in 1847. Within four years, there were 11,252 children enrolled in one-room schools up and down California. By 1854, there were almost twenty thousand children and 169 official schools.
The 1850 US California census, the first census that included all non-Indian people, showed 7,019 females, including 4,165 non-Indian females older than age fifteen. However, to this should be added another 1,300 women (older than fifteen) living in San Francisco, Santa Clara, and Contra Costa counties where censuses were lost and not included in the recorded totals.
By 1852, the state population increased to about two hundred thousand, of which roughly 10 percent were female. According to the 1860 census, California’s population totaled 330,000 individuals, with 223,000 males and 107,000 females. By 1870, the population had increased to 560,000 with 349,000 males and 211,000 females—or a ratio of 100 males to 38 females.
In San Francisco, the port of entry for California’s steamships, the population exploded from two hundred in 1846 to thirty-six thousand in 1852. The immediate problem of housing led to the construction of canvas-covered tents and wooden structures made from the abandoned ships crowding the harbor.
Mixed marriages were quite common in early California; this is the Lee Southard family on the Klamath, circa 1900.
Courtesy Siskiyou County Museum
Women worked as hard as their husbands.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Robert Semple, a delegate from Solano County at the first Constitutional Convention of California, held in Monterey in 1849, wrote: “I regard education as a subject of particular importance here in California . . . here, above all places in the Union, we should have, and we possess the resources to have, a well regulated system of education. Education, sir, is the foundation of republican institutions; the school system suits the genius and the spirit of our form of government. . . . They must be educated; they must educate their children; they must provide means for the diffusion of knowledge and the progress of enlightened principles.”
As demonstrated by Semple, the California legislature was encouraged “by all suitable means” to promote “the intellectual, scientific, moral and agricultural improvement” through education. With California’s population growing quickly, schools were opened up and down the state. Even today, a number of rural schools remain primary centers for outlying areas, particularly in the northern part of the state.
Conditions were often primitive, but many schools were improved upon over time. The Igo Schoolhouse, now located on the fairgrounds in Anderson, California, was built circa 1872. It operated in Igo as a school for almost a hundred years.
Igo Schoolhouse, now located at the Shasta County fairgrounds
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Electricity came to Igo and the schoolhouse in 1941; but even though it had electricity, a wood stove heated the schoolhouse. Running water was added in the 1950s, but prior to that a trustee of the school was paid $1 a month to carry water in each day in a bucket. As with most early schools, the restrooms were located outside.
In 1910, fire in Igo destroyed a hotel, a store, a blacksmith shop, and a residence. Fortunately the wind was blowing away from the schoolhouse and the building was spared.
The Douglas Flat School is the oldest surviving schoolhouse in Calaveras County, California. Built during the gold rush, circa 1854 or 1856, the building remains much as it did over 160 years ago. It continues to serve the community in a number of ways: as a church, a Sunday school, a kindergarten classroom, and a school office. It also functions as a meeting place for community activities. Reportedly, the building may have been moved to its present spot from a location closer to Coyote Creek.
Altaville Grammar School, in Calaveras County, California, was also one of the oldest schools in California. Founded in 1858, the red brick schoolhouse was built with money raised at a dance at a local saloon! It was the only schoolhouse in the community for over ninety years.
Susanne Twight-Alexander attended this school in Calaveras County, California. She is seated on the far left, second row, and is wearing a white sweater.
Courtesy Susanne Twight-Alexander
Altaville Grammar School is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
In Amador County, California, the first schoolhouse was built in Sutter Creek in 1857. That school burned in 1870 and the second school was constructed in 1871. The area was reasonably prosperous, allowing the community to build a solid two-story brick school with a low gabled roof and a small bell tower. Today the old Sutter Grammar Creek School is one of the few remaining two-story brick schoolhouses of such size and quality.
The old schoolhouse in Indio, California, was the second school to be built in the area and it served students from grades kindergarten through eighth. The school and the region grew rapidly as a result of the impact of the Southern Pacific Railroad.
The Indio schoolhouse was later used as a hospital during the great 1918 flu epidemic that took about 600,000 lives in the United States and 50 million around the world. During the 1930s, it was moved to serve as a separate classroom for Roosevelt School. Today the restored one-room schoolhouse is part of the Coachella Valley History Museum, which was established in 1965.
Anaheim, California, was originally settled by a group of German immigrants who moved from San Francisco to the southland. In September 1857 this community became the oldest “colonial settlement” established in the state.
In 1860, nine pupils attended a school in Anaheim, California. The first teacher was Fred William Kuelp. Like the simple adobe structure that housed the students, the schooling was basic.
Building a school was a serious priority. The people constructed an adobe building to be used as both a schoolhouse and an assembly hall. However, four years later, during the winter of 1861–62, the Santa Ana River overflowed and damaged the school. After the flood, school was held in the Water Company’s building until 1869, when a new schoolhouse was built.
In 1877, the second schoolhouse was deemed inadequate for the increasing student population. Professor J. M. Guinn, who had been the principal of the Anaheim schools, authorized the district to sell bonds in order to generate enough money to fund a new school. The school was later reported to be the “handsomest building in the county outside of Los Angeles city” and remained in operation until 1920.
Historically, Guinn’s strategy was significant; selling bonds to raise capital has become a very common method of funding new school projects throughout California.
In 1857, the Vernon School was opened in the town that is now known as Verona, in Sutter County, California. Classes were first held in a hotel and then in the town bowling alley. In 1863, a schoolhouse was built. That schoolhouse is still standing and is considered to be possibly one of the oldest standing schoolhouses in the state.
On April 2, 1866, the California Legislature approved “an act to create the County of Kern, to define its boundaries and to provide for its organization.” In November of that year, the Board of Supervisors called for the organization of school districts in the communities of Tejon, Havilah, Kelso Valley, and Lynn’s Valley, which no longer exists. A district was formed in Tehachapi later, in November 1866, and from thirteen students that first year, attendance grew to thirty-two in 1880–81.
The first school in Kern County, built in 1866, was a log structure located about two miles south of Bakersfield. It was about twenty feet square, but had no windows and only a simple earthen floor. It did have a fireplace at one end and roughly hewn log benches.
The first teacher was P. R. Hamilton who moved north from Los Angeles. However, he taught only three months; Mrs. Grace Ann Ranney was the second teacher. The third instructor was an elderly woman, Miss Lucy Jackson. Miss Jackson remained for two years.
The school was supported by subscription, each student paying $2.50 a month, but materials were few and there wasn’t even a map or globe.
One event stood out during Miss Jackson’s tenure that affected both students and teacher: A rattlesnake crawled in and curled up in the center of the room. When the children saw the snake, they rushed from the school. An older boy managed to kill the intruder, and though the students reluctantly returned, for weeks the smaller children sat with their feet drawn up under the benches. Miss Jackson soon retired from teaching.
A school in Dogtown, California, in 1911
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Postcard of Wyandotte School in Butte County, California, signed by two teachers in May 1907
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
The La Grange School, in La Grange, Stanislaus County, California, was built in 1875. The one-room school, which featured the traditional bell tower, actually replaced a rough timber school that had been built circa 1855. The first teacher on record was C. C. Wright, from Iowa; he arrived in 1866. Wright also became an attorney and served as the district attorney of Stanislaus County from 1876 to 1879, then served in the state assembly in 1886. One of his most important pieces of legislation was the Wright California Irrigation Act, signed into law in 1887.
According to various sources, Bret Harte may have taught school at La Grange while on his way to the Sierra Gold Fields.
Bret Harte reportedly taught school at La Grange circa the 1850s.
Courtesy Fort Jones Museum
The Dixie School in San Rafael, Marin County, California, was built in 1864. James Miller—who arrived in 1844—donated the property upon which Dixie School was built. The story goes that on their way west, while camped at Independence Rock, Wyoming, his wife gave birth to a little girl; they named her Ellen Independence Miller. The school was used until 1957; the last teacher was Josephine Codoni Leary.
The Dixie School is considered the oldest one-room school in Marin County, California.
The Dixie School was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
The first, simple frame Spring Schoolhouse was built in 1890 and was located thirteen miles southwest of the town of Dorris, in northeastern California. In 1899, Mary M. McCraig was the teacher. Ten students attended school for six months. During the winter of 1924–25, Lester Huffman’s father, tending to his dairy cows, spied the schoolhouse engulfed in flames. It burned to the ground in minutes.
While a new school was built, classes were held in a bunkhouse on the Briggs’ ranch. In addition to a new school, two barns were built to house the children’s horses. One story about that time period involved Lester Huffman’s mother. As she was driving her children to school in her wagon, the horse nearly disappeared into a huge hole. A neighbor rushed to help her free the horse and wagon.
The Spring School was closed in April 1949, after which it stood abandoned.
In 1977, the school building was donated by the Butte Valley School District and brought to Yreka, California. It is now part of Siskiyou County Museum’s “Outdoor Museum.” According to director Lisa Gioia, “The Spring Schoolhouse remains a wonderful example of a one-room schoolhouse. Students from all over come to see how children in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lived.”
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Locke was California’s largest rural Chinatown, but it was in 1905 that the US Supreme Court required California to extend public education to the children of Chinese immigrants. In 1915, the local chapter of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) built the schoolhouse as a meeting place and town hall. From 1926 until 1940 the building also served as a school to teach the Chinese language to local children. In those days the school was known as the Kao Ming School.
Two Chinese girls pose for the camera. Gerhard Sisters, photographer.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
Willow Creek School students, circa 1908, including (in no particular order) Josie DeAvilla, Ernest Betts, Jimmie Foster, Hermie Foster, Earl Ager, Alvie Quadrus, and Enzie Quadros.
Courtesy Siskiyou County Museum
Naomi Cooksey went to Laguna Elementary, located off Chileno Valley Road, in the beautiful ranch lands of western Petaluma, California. Built in 1906, Laguna School continues to function as an active schoolhouse while housing two newly renovated multi-age classrooms serving kindergarten through sixth grade.
The first recorded mention of the Shasta County town of Kennett appeared in the Daily Alta California dated June 7, 1852, after gold had been found in Backbone Creek, the future location of Kennett. Kennett Schoolhouse was later flooded by the filling of Shasta Lake.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
GloryAnn (Colt) Jenner attended Callahan School. One memory she shared was how the boys would eagerly run out at recess and across the East Fork of the Scott River then climb the rough cliffs and rocky ledges on the far side. “Nobody said much,” she noted, “although that would never be permitted now.”
She began school at age six and stayed to the sixth grade. She recalled that the bus driver, who was a junior in high school, drove the bus to school and home again. “That, too, would never be permitted these days!”
School children at Callahan School, circa 1941. GloryAnn is second from the right in the back row, between the teacher’s daughter on the left and MaryAnn Grossen on the right. Others in the photo (in no particular order) include EddyLou Garner, Herbie Wright, Steve Farrington, Bud Fowler, Bonnie Fowler, Paul Black, Mildred Wright, Joanne Black, Bev Hughes, Shirley Hayden, and Alberta Borba.
Courtesy GloryAnn Jenner
Sadly, by 1974, the population dwindled to two students—Robin and Shawn Hayden—making the school’s closure necessary. Mrs. Kathy Moore was Callahan’s last teacher and when it closed, she remarked, “This is a sad day for our little community.”
The last day of the Callahan School, 1974. Kathy Moore, the teacher, sits with Robin and Shawn Hayden, the school’s last two students. The last two students to attend the Callahan School were related to the school’s first teacher, Rosalea Barnum.
Courtesy Siskiyou County Museum
Lanora Phelps shared that two of her four kids attended the one-room school in Little Shasta, near Montague, Siskiyou County, California. Little Shasta School was established circa 1857, but the present building was constructed in 1875. It is actually one of the two oldest continuously running schools in the state of California and is still operating today; there is one teacher plus a part-time aide, one computer/lunch and after-school person, and thirteen kids.
Betty Davis Carrier started school at Little Shasta in the fall of 1937. Her first teacher was Mrs. Fern Meamber of Yreka, who taught all eight grades, with a total of fifteen students. Betty was one of three children in the first grade. She described the schoolhouse this way: “When I first attended school, the building was heated with an oil heater, that at various times would explode into a cloud of oily soot. There was no running water in the building, so we would pull a bucket of water from a dug well in the front yard. There were two outhouses in each corner of the yard, one for the girls and one for the boys. A large closet in the center of the building held our coats, galoshes and lunches. We did have one extra room that was used as a playroom on rainy/snowy days, and it also doubled as a stage for Christmas programs and for graduation.”
Another nearby school was Tablerock, located on the Davis ranch road; it was established in 1869 and terminated in 1932.
Tablerock Schoolhouse and students, circa 1888
Courtesy Siskiyou County Museum
Shasta River School celebrates a reunion with several former students.
Courtesy Shari Fiock Sandahl
Charles H. Fiock wrote in his memoir It’s Me, May I Come In? about living on a farm in Shasta Valley and attending the local Shasta River School. Shasta Valley makes up a large section of Siskiyou County, not far from Yreka, the county seat. Eventually, Shasta River School joined the Yreka Elementary School District, along with other very small schools, including Cherry Creek, Mono, Ross, and the Honolulu School.
The Honolulu School was located east of the Shasta River schools, along State Route 96 on the Klamath River. Nothing remains today except a small sign, but the school was named in recognition of a group of Hawaiians—also known as “Kanakas”—who settled in the area during the gold rush.
The Honolulu Schoolhouse and playground
Courtesy Siskiyou County Museum
Life on the river was not always easy, recalled Charles Fiock. In fact, one year, during wintertime, “a blizzard came and covered the valley white with snow. Then it got very cold and a blanket of fog made it hard to see. [My brothers and sisters] had to walk a mile to a one-room country school . . . the Shasta River School. [Our folks] had told [them] to stay together on the way to and from school. The mountains about the valley were so cold that coyotes would come down into the valley to find something to eat. The farmers kept their chickens in the chicken houses, the turkeys in the turkey sheds, and the pigs in the pigpens—so the coyotes got very hungry and mean. [Father said] they might even eat little boys and girls if [the coyotes] found them out by themselves.
“One day, on the way to school, our sister Mary (‘Quite Contrary’) decided to run ahead to talk to the teacher before any other children got to school, [but] when brothers Carl, Lloyd, Webster, and sister Kay got to the schoolhouse, Mary was not to be found! I was only four years old, but I remember Mother rang the telephone with a crank (it was like a box on the wall) and told the neighbors that Mary was lost in the snow and fog. . . . Everybody started looking for Mary.
“At the schoolhouse the children never stopped ringing the bell, loud and clear, so that Mary might hear it and find her way to the schoolhouse. Their arms became tired so they took turns ringing the bell . . . but they never stopped all day.
“When the sun was about to [set], everyone was afraid that the coyotes might be following Mary; what would happen when it got cold and dark and Mary stopped walking? The children rang the bell harder and harder and louder and louder. . . .
“[Suddenly] out of the fog came ‘Merry Mary Quite Contrary!’ Relieved, all the children [were able] to go home.”
The little red Lagunita Schoolhouse, located on San Juan Grade Road facing Sugar Loaf Mountain, on the northern outskirts of Salinas, California, was built in 1897. The quaint, historic one-room schoolhouse served the area’s children from first to eighth grade until 1967 when the building was condemned. Lagunita Schoolhouse was the one John Steinbeck wrote about in his novel The Red Pony.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Today the Centerville School has been incorporated into the Colman Community Memorial Museum complex. Locals have enthusiastically supported the museum and its efforts to preserve and display artifacts of the region. The old school is also used as a community center.
Courtesy Teresa Davis
Schools had to have a minimum of seven students. In 1914, a school was built in Seiad Valley near the Lowden ranches. When the number of students here grew, a larger school was built nearer the Arial Lowden Ranch, circa 1920. Teachers included Queen Huey, Geneive High, and Frances Collins in the first years, and Mrs. [Lena] Crabtree and Mrs. Burch during the 1930s and 1940s.
Shown here are the Seiad students of 1935: Top row: Vivian Prather, Dorothy Thomas, Paul Hawks, and Billy Stock; Middle row: Shirley Crawford, Donnie Thomas, Louella Hawks, Oliver Stock, and Gene Miller. Front row: Delberta Lighthill, Hazel Roberts (Gendron), Dorothy Flack, Kenny Lighthill, and Lee Stock.
Courtesy Hazel Gendron
The Weaverville Courthouse is the second oldest courthouse in California still in use today. It originally housed offices and a saloon that boasted the first piano in the county.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Pepperwood was one of the northernmost communities in Humboldt County, California, and was known for its farming and agricultural land. A number of dairies and creameries were established around the area. The post office was open from 1887 to 1892 and then again from 1901 to 1965. Two floods, one in 1955 and the other in 1964, wiped out the town. Pepperwood School was one of Humboldt County’s early schools.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
The Stone Lagoon School, north of Eureka, is known as “The Little Red Schoolhouse.”
Carol M. Highsmith photographer/Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Colorado
When Colorado became a state in 1876, the Western Slope was at first divided into seven counties. In 1885, these counties were redistricted so there were then eighteen. There had been some discovery of carbonate, lead, and silver deposits, but the discovery did not amount to much. Within a few months, the gold rush was over, but the rush to populate the state was still on.
From 1875 to 1892, Independence School of Fort Lupton, Colorado, was known as the Acorn Academy—named for the Acorn cattle brand used by the family who donated the land. In 1892, the students at the school changed its name to Independence School. In May of 1900, the one-room schoolhouse was replaced by a brick two-room school, leaving the original frame school to be used as a residence, often as housing for migrant farm workers.
In 1992, the Watada family donated the old schoolhouse to the South Platte Valley Historical Society and it was moved to a temporary location on the society’s Fort Lupton Historic Park property. Then, in 1996, it was moved to its permanent location within Fort Lupton Historic Park. Grant money was received from the Colorado Historical Fund and private donations and volunteers provided the labor to restore the school to its original condition.
Indian Park School in Sedalia, Douglas County, Colorado, was built in 1884. Identified as District #7, the school was known by various names as well, including: Jarre Canon School, Mountain School, Brown’s School (for Orville Brown who homesteaded the neighboring property), and finally Indian Park School.
William Smith purchased the land for the school in 1883. Located just north of Colorado Highway 67, ten miles west of Sedalia, the school was built in 1884. There were never more than twelve students attending the school. During the winter there was heavy snow, and it’s been recorded that sometimes the snow was so deep, students could stand atop the boys’ and girls’ outhouses in order to lob snowballs at each other.
Unlike most schoolhouses, Indian Park School was never moved. In 1959, however, it was one of the last one-room schools in Douglas County to close. In 1974, the building was purchased by the Indian Park Schoolhouse Association and placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Wallace Creek runs through both Mesa and Garfield Counties on its way to the Colorado River. Granlee Gulch School was one of the schools established in Garfield County. One of the early superintendents of the county was Mrs. Lucy DeWitt.
Granlee Gulch School, circa 1900
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Montezuma is located in eastern Summit County, Colorado, at an elevation of 10,400 feet. In 2010, its population numbered sixty-five. The first school was built in 1880, but in 1884, a newer framed schoolhouse replaced it. The belfry, bell, and entry hall were added after 1884. In addition, the white clapboard siding was added to cover the brown board-and-batten walls. Interestingly, ladders were placed on the roof in case of fire, as required by the town’s fire ordinances. Still, fire damaged the school in 1915, 1949, and 1958.
The school also featured two attached double-seater outhouses—one for girls and one for boys—at the back of the building. They were used until the school closed in 1958.
Young Bruce Bishop and his twin sister Barbara attended the Lebanon School in the 1950s, in the southwestern corner of the state, between Cortez and Dolores, Colorado. His family lived one and a half miles from the school, and the kids would either walk or ride horses. There was a stable (called a “barn”) behind the school, and at recess, the children were required to go tend their horses. The area was a ranching and farming community.
On the first day of school, Bruce remembered taking his Lone Ranger lunchbox to school. Both he and Barbara rode to school together. Because the school and community were located at an elevation of 6,500 feet, winters were cold—very cold. Bruce commented, “We kids would take our sleds and ride along the hill that run along the road. It was perfect for sledding.” On the other hand, Bruce added, “We had an outhouse and in the winter, it was very cold. Thank goodness, in the second grade, we got indoor plumbing.”
Bruce also shared, “I remember in first grade, there was a bell at the top of the school and a long rope that hung down. Mrs. Ruth Lyons would pull the rope and we kids would hang on it and go up and down. You could hear it for miles!”
Bruce credits Mrs. Lyons for instilling in him his love of learning, in particular math. “I would hurry through my own lessons so that I could do the upper level math problems.”
As students entered the school, the boys’ coatroom was on the right, the girls’ coatroom was on the left. There was a stove that burned coal and, added Bruce, “Just inside the front door was a well, but we had to pump water and we were allowed to only get a drink at recess.”
The school was built in 1907. Noted Bruce, “My grandfather, Wilbur Bishop, helped build the school, even though my father attended a different school. Both of them, however, are buried half a mile from the school.”
Because Bruce’s father worked in oil exploration, after second grade the family moved away. Bruce attended slightly bigger schools, in Wyoming, Utah, and other Colorado sites, but the family returned to the Lebanon school when he was in the sixth grade. “It was a rude awakening,” noted Bruce, because by then the kids were being bussed into town to a larger school.
The Lebanon School is closed now and has been turned into a bed and breakfast.
Courtesy Bruce and Vonita Bishop
For those traveling west, finding a community with a school was a plus. In 1859, settlers arriving in West Denver, Colorado, were pleased to note that a school had been established. Although leaky and mud-roofed, the one-room log cabin called the Union School was opened up near the corner of Twelfth and Black. O. J. Goldrick was the schoolmaster, and thirteen children were enrolled.
In 1860, the Union School moved to a shingled one-room building. The school grew so quickly that another teacher had to be hired. Then in 1862, the first East Denver School Board was elected and School District #1 was created.
The Colorado town of Gold Hill also dates back to the early gold mining days. In January 1859, gold was discovered in Gold Run Creek located near the center of today’s town of Gold Hill. By summer 1859 the town’s population numbered between three and five thousand, although most of the town was little more than a tent city. The town’s prosperity lasted only a few years; by the late 1860s—as the mines played out and America was thrust into the Civil War—Gold Hill was nearly deserted.
In 1872, however, with the discovery of tellurium, which was a form of gold ore heretofore overlooked, Gold Hill went through a revival. With this influx of new inhabitants, the town experienced a building boom. Twenty dwellings, six boardinghouses, a hotel, two stores, a meat market, a blacksmith shop, two stables, two saloons and a schoolhouse were built.
The first school was a log structure that served as a schoolhouse during the week and a church on Sundays. That first year there were thirty-one students taught by Miss Hannah C. Spalding, a native of Massachusetts. The October 17, 1873 issue of the Boulder County News named Gold Hill’s new school “one of the best schools in the County.”
In 1890, however, the original school was dismantled and replaced by a larger one-room frame structure, which is still used as the room for grades three to five.
Against all odds, Gold Hill School has remained in continual operation ever since the one-room log school opened in 1873, and it narrowly survived being destroyed by a wildfire in November 1894 when the entire town was saved by a dramatic change of wind and the onset of a snowstorm.
Although its enrollment has fluctuated from one student to eighty in its 135 years of operation, Gold Hill School is the longest continually operating school in Colorado.
Idaho
Idaho was actually one of the last of the forty-eight continental states to be settled by those of European descent. The Native American tribes residing here probably numbered ten thousand (but estimates vary) before the Lewis and Clark Expedition entered the region in 1805, and a second expedition crossed southern Idaho circa 1811 or 1812. The fur trade was responsible for much of the early exploration of the region.
The first settled town in Idaho was Franklin, established by emigrating Mormons in 1860. Mormon pioneers actually established a majority of historic communities in southeastern Idaho. Immigrants from England, Ireland, and Germany also began to arrive in the late nineteenth century. In February 1879, Washington County was officially created by an act of the ninth territorial legislature.
After the arrival of the railroad, towns in Idaho grew at a rapid pace. In 1881, the Weiser School District was formed from land that was formerly a part of the lower Mann Creek of Jeffreys District. The Mann Creek Schoolhouse was a small wood frame school.
Silver City, Idaho, was established in 1864. Located on the east side of Jordan Creek in the Owyhee Mountains of southwest Idaho, Silver City was a successful mining town. The two-story wood frame school was built in 1892 and used until 1934 after the county seat was moved to Melba and Silver City’s population dwindled.
Beginning in the 1960s, artifacts and other memorabilia from the community were maintained in the second story of the schoolhouse. In 1972, the school was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and today, the Historic Silver City Foundation, Inc., owns the schoolhouse.
The town of Mora, in Ada County, Idaho, was situated on the trail to Silver City. Settled between 1907 and 1909, the Mora Schoolhouse was built in 1910 for the sum of $2,900. The school served the community until the mid-1950s when it had to be closed because of well contamination. Ironically, the school was sold in 1966 for $2,200! Today little of Mora remains.
Orchard, Idaho, also in Ada County, was laid out in 1895. Previously known as Bisuka, the town was located near the Elmore County line. Little remains except the one-room schoolhouse, which served locals from the early 1900s until 1966.
Dr. Harlan Page Ustick, a doctor and astute businessman, founded Ustick, Idaho, in 1907, when a streetcar company built a line through the area, connecting it with Boise and surrounding towns. Ustick was a highly productive agricultural area known for its vast apple orchards, and supported a school, a bank, a store, a church, a creamery, and vinegar processing plants. It was written that Ustick had “the finest orchard in the Boise Valley.”
The Ustick School, a four-room building, was constructed between 1909 and 1911. It was a cream-colored two-story brick building with a cedar-shingled roof. Built in the colonial revival style, the front porch boasted Ionic columns and a round arch framed the door. Windows were seven feet tall. The interior of the school was paneled and the detailed woodwork reflected Craftsman-style touches.
The Bellgrove School, in Kootenai County, Idaho, was built in 1918, after the land—which had been within the boundary of the Coeur d’Alene Reservation—was relinquished to the US government by treaty. An earlier school had preceded the 1918 schoolhouse; in addition, two log schoolhouses in a nearby area also preceded it. Heavy logging and a fire in 1910 adversely affected the region. Bellgrove School was used until 1958, when it was brought into the Worley School District.
A number of wood frame one-room schools were built in Kootenai County, Idaho, circa the turn of the twentieth century.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Meridian, Idaho, is located on the Snake River basin plain at the south end of the state. The community’s earliest settlers lived along Five Mile Creek, where water runs year-round. Eliza Ann Zenger filed Meridian’s town site on homestead grant land in 1893; she and her husband had come from Utah.
Around 1900, the area’s farmers established fruit orchards, in particular apples and prunes, and built fruit packing businesses and prune dryers alongside the railroad tracks. The town’s one-room school began classes in 1904; the school was located at the corners of Pine Street and Meridian Road.
School children and teacher having a picnic outside their Idaho schoolhouse
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Kansas
In 1854, passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act opened Kansas and Nebraska to settlement. The rush was on to find good land. Settlers poured in from Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, and many other states. The early days of Kansas settlement was a race between Free Staters and Slaveholders that would determine how Kansas would be admitted to the Union. Conflicting constitutions were passed and Kansas engaged in a number of bloody conflicts even before the Civil War.
A second rush into Kansas took place after the Civil War and the passage of the Homestead Act—which offered 160 acres of land to anyone who could “prove” a claim. For a hundred years, white frame or native stone one-room schoolhouses were spread across the section corners of Kansas, with names like Prairie Flower, Buzzard Roost, and Good Intent. Children across the state often had to endure harsh weather, dust storms, and prairie fires on the way to or from school.
The schoolteacher, sometimes only a little older than her pupils, was a renaissance individual. She had to be a nurse, janitor, musician, philosopher, peacemaker, wrangler, fire stoker, baseball player, professor, and poet—all for less than $50 a month. From the early 1800s to about 1950, at least nine thousand one-room schools operated throughout Kansas. By 1945, the number of schools dropped to 7,200.
The materials used in constructing Kansas schools depended on the area’s physical landscape. In eastern Kansas, schools like Arvonia were built of native limestone, or, as with the Shawnee Indian Mission, of brick. Many schools throughout Kansas were built of wooden clapboard, such as the German Lutheran School. In western Kansas, some early schools, like the Thomas County School, were made from sod because of the lack of timber or stone. Often called “Nebraska marble,” most soddies were characterized by a dirt floor and a mud roof and few if any windows. The soddies often attracted rats, rodents, and other “varmints.” On the other hand, because of the heavy walls, which were often three feet thick, soddies were often cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
The District #34 school in Chase County, Kansas, was built of native limestone in 1896. Even the two outhouses were built of limestone. The Lower Fox Creek School in Strong City, Kansas, built on land donated by Steven F. Jones, was also built of native limestone. Built in 1882, it remained in operation until 1930. Today it is part of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve.
The distinction of the first school in Kansas goes to the Shawnee Indian Mission School, a brick school constructed in 1839. Reverend Thomas Johnson, for whom Johnson County is named, founded the school. The mission, which he established in 1832, was located outside Kansas City. At its height, the mission encompassed two thousand acres with sixteen buildings, including three brick buildings that housed male and female students and teachers. The school had an enrollment of nearly two hundred Indian boys and girls from the ages of five to twenty-three. Today the boys’ building is a museum.
Columbus, Kansas, is situated in Cherokee County, in the southeastern corner of the state. The town was named for Columbus, Ohio, and the first settlement occurred around 1868. The post office was established the next year. The importance of Columbus was that it served as a junction for the Saint Louis–San Francisco and the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railways.
The Golden Rule School #68 in Columbus, Kansas, circa 1890–1910
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Maxine Averill recalled that she taught at Kaw Valley from 1934 to 1935 for $57.50 a month, which was higher than the average $35 to $40 monthly salary. The school had kerosene lights and a large coal stove in the back of the room. Students had their own drinking cups and had to draw well water. Outside toilets were northwest of the building.
The school closed from 1946 to 1948, and then the district voted 19–6 in 1948 to permanently close the school. Leonard Hadl bought the schoolhouse at auction and dismantled it. Pearson Davis bought the site, and Kenneth Tuggle built a home on the site in 1952.
The town of Lanesfield was established in 1859 and served as a mailstop along the Santa Fe Trail. The school was built in 1869, but when the railroad bypassed Lanesfield—also in 1869—the town of Edgerton took root. Many of the buildings were moved to Edgerton from Lanesfield, with the exception of the one-room school. In 1903, Lanesfield School was struck by lightning and the interior of the school had to be rebuilt.
Many of the school’s teachers boarded with the Dillie family. As single young women, they were expected to contribute to the community in addition to teaching the area’s children.
The town council of Boley, Oklahoma, which was another prairie town settled by African-Americans
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Miss Minnie Kissick’s Sunday school class in Mt. Hope, Kansas, reflects how single young teachers were expected to support all levels of social interaction.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
The South Bloomfield School in Goessel, Kansas, was built by a group of Mennonite immigrants who left their village of Alexanderwohl in Russia to settle in America where they could practice their faith. Attracted to the area by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, these settlers valued education. While the first schools were held in homes, eventually enough one-room schools were built so that the distance between each school was only (or no more than) two miles. These structures were of a different construction than the more traditional rectangular-shaped schools seen in other parts of the country. Instead, they were shaped in an I-form, with a small entry, clapboard siding, and three windows on either side. The South Bloomfield School was built in this style in 1874. Charles Munger was the school’s first schoolmaster and was paid $33.50 for a three-month school term.
In 1892, a new school was built to replace the original South Bloomfield School; this school was used until the 1950s. Today it sits on the grounds of the Mennonite Heritage Museum.
Bill Scott (an author who writes as “James Scott”) wrote, “My grandmother, Emma Morris—who was born in 1869—taught in a one-room school from about 1885 to 1894. A fresh graduate of the Ladies’ Seminary in Minneapolis, this [teaching assignment] was her first job.”
Emma Morris began teaching in Kansas when she was eighteen years old.
Courtesy Bill Scott
Bill wrote, “It was in Lenexa, Kansas, a town so small it may no longer exist. Teaching at a one-room multi-grade school with a passel of farm kids must have been daunting to a teenager on her first assignment, but she made a go of it.”
The schoolhouse where Emma Morris first taught, in Lenexa, Kansas
Courtesy Bill Scott
Bill added, “In 1894, she met and married my grandfather, and they moved to Chicago where he was a successful grain broker. I still have her old classroom record book, which is now about 135 years old. It contains lists of students in her classes, assignments, and grades for such things as ‘deportment’, an old word for classroom behavior. She was also a writer, and I have a couple of stories she wrote, and some poetry. Maybe I get my writing talent from her.”
This is one of Emma’s poems, which she wrote in her twenties:
I’m glad I have a good-sized slate,
With lots of room to calculate.
Bring on your sums! I’m ready now;
My slate is clean and I know how.
But don’t you ask me to subtract,
I like to have my slate well packed;
And only two long rows, you know;
Make such a miserable show;
And please, don’t bring me sums to add;
Well, multiplying’s just as bad;
And say! I’d rather not divide
Bring me something I haven’t tried!
Montana
As in California, the discovery of gold in Montana in 1862 and 1863 attracted people from all over. In response to the rapid growth, the Territory of Montana was created in May 1864 by an act of Congress. The territory was larger in size than all six New England states, plus New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland.
Along with gold, the Homestead Act helped to open up Montana. In fact, Montana became the most important homestead state; more than 250,000 emigrants rushed to stake their claims on thirty-two million acres.
By 1910, waves of homesteaders crossed into Montana where they began to plow up the land that had been the homeland of various tribes for generations. The windswept plains of Montana were not easy to cultivate or tame, and many of the homesteaders left in despair. Those who stayed, however, were the most rugged and determined, and building schools was as much a part of their dream as establishing homes and communities.
Homesteaders, circa 1915, breaking the sod
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
As noted in the 1881 Montana school census, out of the 9,479 children listed across the state, 5,000 attended 132 public schools. And in 1899, the first course of study for all public schools was adopted by the legislature. By 1920, the number of one-room schools in Montana totaled over 2,600.
The names of some of these historic one-room schools located across Montana’s fifty-six counties reflect either the historic names of the area’s settlers or some aspect of its surrounding physical landscape, such as Tom Miner, Iron Rod, Wisdom, Divide, Salmon Prairie, Yaak, Wolf Creek, Sunset, Target Range Little White, New Chicago, Sleeping Child, Fishtrap, Pig Eye, Box Elder, Second Creek Shool, Lennep, Big Elk, Howie, Dry Fork, Pontricina, Hay Coulee, SY, Seventy-Nine, Belltower, Rattlesnake, South Stacey, Flatwillow, Cutting, Navajo, Duck, Wide Awake, and Snake Creek.
One amusing anecdote involved the Old Star School in Cutbank, Montana. According to an account collected by Andrew Gulliford in his book, America’s Country Schools,
A fellow came riding into Cut Bank, Montana, one day and stopped at the livery stable to rest his horse. He asked the blacksmith if he knew where any of the Kipp family members lived in the area. The Kipp family was one of the first white settlers in the area and there were lots of them. “Well, you know it’s too bad about them Kipps,” the blacksmith said. “Oh, what happened?” “Well, they had a big family reunion at the Old Star School. It was the only building big enough to hold ’em all. Well, they got to dancin’, drinkin’, and cavortin’ around so much, that someone hit the stove and the stove pipe fell down on ’em all and killed all but a hundred of ’em.”
In 1976, the dilapidated Grant Creek School, built circa 1907, was relocated to Fort Missoula. The school had closed in 1940 and was bought and used as a storeroom. Assisted by volunteers, including a chapter of Delta Kappa Gamma sorority, the school was moved to Fort Missoula and carefully restored.
It is assumed that the first school in Montana was held at Fort Owen in 1861, most specifically for the children of the men at the fort. But there is some discrepancy over whether there was a school in Bannock, Montana (the first territorial capital), as early as 1862 and 1863. According to Mrs. Frank E. Curtis, who arrived in Bannock in September 1862, “There were very few children in camp in the first winter and no school at all.” Mrs. Henry Zoller did open a private school during the summer of 1863.
The city of Twin Bridges boasts Montana’s oldest standing one-room school. It opened in 1867 and closed in 1873.
The first school district organized in Montana was at Virginia City. In 1864, the schoolhouse—which was actually built to be a church—measured fifty feet long by thirty feet wide. Eighty-one pupils registered for school, but no textbooks were to be had—except for whatever families could provide. School opened on March 5, 1866, and ended in mid-August. Before school resumed, an actual log schoolhouse was built.
In 1865, the first school in Bozeman, Gallatin County, was held in the back room of a log store. Miss Florence Royce taught in the second school, in the winter of 1866–67. In 1868, Miss Royce transferred to the first school to be built in Gallatin City, which was also the first school to be constructed with public funds and was built in 1868 and 1869. It cost $500.
In 1874, the Masons built a school in Bannack, Beaverhead County, Montana. It served as both a school and a hall for the Masonic Lodge. The school was unusual in that it was a grand two-story structure with a classical Tuscan design. Most schools by the 1880s and 1890s followed a similar construction, whether made of stone, rock, adobe, or plank. And most schools in Montana were one story, so such a grand structure must have provided an imposing sight. Stairs were attached along the east wall and served as the entrance to the Masonic Hall.
Bannack Schoolhouse was built by Masons in 1874.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
The Cinnabar Basin School near Gardiner, Park County, Montana, was built in 1916 on land owned by Joseph Stermitz Sr. Many of the settlers here were looking to work in the coal mines.
In 2009–2010, the Stermitz family renovated the schoolhouse. Not only did the family work to preserve the structure and maintain its historic integrity, it is now rented out as a place to stay. Many original artifacts are on display inside the old schoolhouse.
Joe Wheeling’s family lived right on the Montana/North Dakota border, where Joe attended the one-room Squaw Gap School. Both of Joe’s parents had attended one-room schools, and his paternal grandfather also taught at one—in addition to being a rancher. Interestingly, Joe’s family’s mailing address was in Sidney, Montana, but the phone number (when it was finally brought in) was provided by a North Dakota company. This region was one of the last to get telephone service.
Squaw Gap School nearly straddles the Montana/North Dakota border.
Courtesy Joe and Jennifer Wheeling
According to Joe, “For a while, we had to use the reservation phone, and we would get calls from all over. Whoever was nearby would answer the phone.”
From first to eighth grade, there was only one other student in Joe’s class, and he was the only boy for two to three years. There were seven students in the school when he enrolled in first grade, but enrollment dropped, and most of the time there were only four to five pupils.
Joe remembers that teachers who were exceptionally good encouraged him to move on. “They would push you and then let you go. By Christmas, I might be done with, say, one of the math books, so they would let me start on the next. It was a wonderfully ‘fluid’ approach to lesson planning.”
He added, “For everyone there was a great sense of community. We kids took turns putting the flag up or down each day. And I cannot remember a time we didn’t take a recess outside—in spite of the harsh winter conditions.”
The playground was a favorite place; even the first graders played “keep away” football, although one time a bigger boy “popped me on the back and broke my collar bone.” In winter, Joe said, “We rode toboggans and sleds down the hill near the school. Sometimes we would be having so much fun, the teacher would have to come out to get us, and then we were tardy (which brought on a consequence).”
Most of the land surrounding the school was either ranchland or US Forest Service land. There was no bus to ride to school, so Joe walked three miles via the main road. The high school was located about thirty-five miles away—meaning that sometimes in bad weather, students stayed with friends or neighbors rather than risking the drive home.
After high school graduation, Joe attended Colorado State University where he majored in pre-vet/animal science, then attended the Wharton School of Business where he obtained his MBA. Joe and his wife Jennifer now ranch on her family’s ranch in Colorado.
As of this writing, Montana still has seventy single-teacher schools, down from 112 in 1990. However, today there are still more operating one-room schools in Montana than in any other state in the nation.
Celebrating the construction of a new schoolhouse in Melstone, Montana, circa 1900
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Nebraska
When the Mexican War began in 1846, there was no Nebraska, only a vast plain called “the Nebraska country.” In fact, it was a part of a still greater territory that had been set apart by Congress in 1834. The land was deemed “Indian country,” from which white settlers were excluded; however, as emigrants moved west, the territory quickly became known to them.
According to Pioneer Stories of Cass County, Nebraska, published by the Cass County Historical Society, “In the early fifties [1850s] a startling headline appeared in the eastern papers, ‘Gold Discovered in Nebraska.’ In truth, this was not an error because at that time the Territory of Nebraska included much of Colorado, all of Wyoming, Montana and the two Dakotas.”
Thus, on June 24, 1854, by proclamation of President Pierce, the Territory of Nebraska was thrown open for settlement and emigrants hurriedly crossed the Missouri to stake out their claims.
Emigrants set up tent cities as they scrambled to stake out their claims.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Miss Adelaide Goodwill ran the first school in Omaha, in 1855. The first school in Lancaster County was established in 1865, in the dugout home of John Cadman. Small, but not quaint, the walls, ceiling, and roof were made with sod, mud, and straw.
Schools of this character, using local materials and perhaps appearing more rustic, are termed “vernacular,” or “folk vernacular.” All across the plains, schools appeared in a variety of temporary or vernacular construction. The first school in Alliance, Nebraska, was actually a tent. Tents were also used frequently in Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming.
Unfortunately, though sod or mud structures were sturdy and relatively insulated against cold and heat, they were susceptible to rain, especially since they characteristically had dirt floors. They were also susceptible to infestation by rodents and snakes. A sod school in Logan County, Nebraska, built circa 1890, was barely large enough to hold three students, yet the school was also the teacher’s residence, with only a bed and some cooking paraphernalia provided.
One sod school in Thomas County, Nebraska, was a dugout school but also boasted a clapboard front façade. Another school in Scotts Bluff County, Nebraska, was built of baled straw walls, with a sod roof and dirt floor. It was barely seven feet high. Reportedly, grazing cattle “devoured” the school in two years. Another Nebraska school in Custer County was also built into a hillside, but along its sides the cornstalks used to keep the stove burning were often rifled through by hogs.
While sod structures were used frequently, when money was available, residents built frame schools, although even as late as 1934, a sod high school was built in the Sandhills of Nebraska so that students could pursue a secondary education closer to home. A teacherage was also built of sod, as were the privies and a barn. To heat the school, students and teacher collected cow patties, which burned easily.
The Red-Brick School House, in Blakely Township, Nebraska, was open from 1872 to 1967. By the time it closed, it was the oldest continuously used one-room school in the township. It served not only as a school, but also as a church, meeting hall, polling place, and social and political center of the community. Blakely Township is one of twenty-four townships in Gage County and over 80 percent of the population is of German descent.
In the middle of the Nebraska prairie, just west of the Homestead National Monument of America’s visitor center, stands a small red brick schoolhouse. Built in 1872, it replaced an earlier log structure. The school is known as the Freeman School; however, there is disagreement on how it got its name. According to one report, “It is unclear if the school was named for homesteader Daniel Freeman, or for the brick maker, Thomas Freeman.”
While Daniel Freeman was the first homesteader in Blakely Township, the new school building was made of red-orange bricks that came from the kiln of Thomas Freeman, and both served on the local school board. The school was well reputed, with schoolbooks provided to the children in 1881, “a decade before the state of Nebraska required schools to do so.”
The Freeman School operated from 1872 to 1967, and when it closed, it was considered one of the oldest operating schools in Nebraska. The National Park Service decided to preserve the school because of its important role in the pioneer history of the state. In 1973, the National Park Service initiated work to return the school to its pre-1900 appearance. It is now an historic landmark and attracts visitors from all around the state.
In 1869, Hanover, Nebraska’s first school building was built at the north edge of town. It was a one-story stone building. In 1879, a second building was constructed, large enough to accommodate the increased student enrollment.
G. H. Hollenberg, founder of Hanover, was quoted as saying, “Our educational advantages are almost as good as can be found anywhere in the state. A fine stone schoolhouse graces one of the beautiful eminences of the town, situated on one of the more prominent natural rises which characterize the town.”
Harmony School, or School District #53, was a one-room schoolhouse located in Otoe County, Nebraska. The building was built in 1879 and used until 1997. In the 1930s, there were forty-two students crammed into the school building. Harmony School was the longest operating one-room schoolhouse in Nebraska, serving its community for 118 years. Today the school is privately owned.
Scenes and Incidents from the Recent Terrible Blizzard in Dakota on January 12, 1888. The storm came with no warning, and some accounts say that the temperature fell nearly 100 degrees in just 24 hours. The blizzard killed 235 people including many children. Frank Leslie’s Weekly, January 28, 1888.
Courtesy Wikipedia
An old school side by side with the new school, being built. Note the ladder and the outhouses.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Miss Grace Hurlbut, Bev Scott’s maternal grandmother, obtained her teaching certificates and then received a teaching contract for Hooker County, Nebraska, beginning in 1897. She stopped teaching when she married O. H. Moody.
Grace Hurlbut obtained her second grade teaching certificate in 1897.
Courtesy Bev Scott
O. H. Moody, Bev’s grandfather, also obtained teaching certificates and then received a teaching contract from Custer County, Nebraska, beginning in 1895. Later on he also served as a school superintendent, until he returned home to take over the family farm.
O. H. Moody obtained his first grade teaching certificate on August 17, 1895.
Courtesy Bev Scott
Bev’s paternal grandmother, Eva Ellen Russell Scott, actually became the first school superintendent in Thomas County, Nebraska. She also stepped in to teach at May School when her nephew, Lloyd Krickbaum, went off to war in 1917.
Students stand in front of May School, Thomas County, Nebraska, circa 1917.
Courtesy Bev Scott
Interestingly, many women served as school or county superintendents. The first woman in the country to hold the position of state superintendent was Laura Eisenhuth, in 1893, of North Dakota. But women were voting in school elections by 1890 in fifteen states and territories. In Republic County, Kansas, women served frequently as county superintendents. The first was Lucy Howard, in 1896. In Albany County, Wyoming, women served from 1885 to 1937, and in Brown County, Nebraska, only one man was elected to the position during a seventy-eight-year period, from 1897 to 1975.
In Omaha, Nebraska, far more women than men served as teachers.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
In 1984, of the 835 one-room schools still operating around the country, Nebraska had the highest number of one-room schools, with 360, but that number has dwindled considerably. In remote rural counties such as Sioux County, the schools were an important addition to the social and economic fabric.
Nevada
Mining began at Goodsprings Township in southern Clark County, Nevada, as early as 1856 when emigrating Mormons from Las Vegas opened a lead mine at Potosi. The Goodsprings or Yellow Pine Mining District was established in 1882 and named for Joseph Good, whose cattle watered at a spring in the southeastern foothills of the Spring Mountains. Goodsprings became one of the most productive mining districts in Clark County; lead, silver, copper, zinc, and gold were all mined there.
The first Goodsprings School was established in 1907—in a tent—and Miss Winifred Hardy served as its first teacher. A schoolhouse was erected in 1913, and it is the oldest school in Clark County to be built as a school and continues to be used today. Its centennial was celebrated in 2013.
Washoe City, eighteen miles south of Reno, was established in 1860 as a lumbering camp for Virginia City. The foothills near Washoe Lake were covered with trees and there was an unlimited supply of waterpower, which could be used to power the lumber mills. Settled circa 1861, Washoe City became an important center for the surrounding farms, sawmills, and quartz mills. Ore wagons made their way daily to Virginia City.
Members of the International Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF) and Masons built the school; the lodges also helped build a hospital and several churches. Though the population soared to nearly six thousand by the mid-1860s, eventually the mining and milling economies declined, and the Washoe City post office closed in 1894. Today Washoe City is a ghost town.
Miners flocked to Nevada as new mine sites were located. Fawcett Waldon, photographer.
Courtesy Library of Congress
Entrance to the Comstock Mines, Dayton, Lyon County, Nevada
Courtesy Library of Congress
The Golconda School, built in 1888, is located at Morrison and Fourth Streets in Golconda, Nevada. It remains an unusually well preserved nineteenth-century wood-frame school.
The Buena Vista One-Room Schoolhouse, in Unionville, Nevada, was built in 1871 for only $2,500. It continued to operate until 1955 and is now privately owned.
The Old Schoolhouse at Sherman Station, in Elko, Nevada, is part of the Sherman Station Visitor’s Center. The school has been restored to what it most likely looked like one hundred years ago, with such features as a teacher’s desk, a potbelly stove, a map, and a blackboard.
Glendale, Nevada, located one mile southeast of Sparks, is home to the oldest one-room school in Nevada. Built in 1864, it was used continuously until 1958. It was the first school to be built in the Truckee Meadows area. It started out in 1857 as a way station and trading post for westbound wagon trains, many of which crossed the Truckee River at this point. Two men—Stone and Gates—operated a toll bridge and ferry, beginning in 1860. Glendale also served as the terminus for a turnpike running almost to Virginia City.
When the Glendale school opened in 1864, it served families in Truckee Meadows. The community boasted two stores, a hotel, a mercantile, a blacksmith, and several saloons. After Reno was established in 1868, however, much of Glendale’s commercial business moved away. In 1976, the school building was relocated to Reno. In 1993, it was relocated again to its current location in Sparks.
The Galena Creek Schoolhouse in Storey County, Nevada, located south of Galena Creek, was built during the heyday of Galena, sometime in the 1860s. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2011, what is unusual about this schoolhouse is that it was built with hand-cut local stone.
Another unique school was the Barclay School built in Clover Valley, Nevada, circa 1905. The board-and-batten schoolhouse sported a hand-hammered copper bell tower.
An amusing account of a schoolhouse occurred in the town of Currie, Nevada. The schoolhouse had been built on a local widow’s land, and she was determined to take it over, declaring “she was going to make it into a washhouse.” The townspeople fought to keep it, so when the widow left by train to go to Elko for the sheriff, several teams of draft horses appeared “as if by magic.” The schoolhouse, the pupils, and the teacher moved it down the road to a bit of railroad property.
As related in Andrew Gulliford’s America’s Country Schools, “When the sheriff stepped from the train that afternoon, the school was in session as usual, and he could find no sign of its ever having been on the lot in town. Strange, too, the sheriff couldn’t find a single person who had seen the school on that spot.”
The Elgin School in Elgin, Nevada, offered its teacher an attached teacherage—a rare treat for many early teachers. It was attached via a hallway that separated the living quarters from the classroom.
New Mexico
In 1880, New Mexico had no publicly funded school system, nor did it have a private school system, thus New Mexico’s historic schoolhouses have a much more recent origin. The landscape is one of dramatic images, as seen by the image of Shiprock, located in the Navajo reservation in San Juan County. Its peak elevation is 7,177 feet. The rock is sacred, and, according to legend, it is all that remains of the giant bird that carried the Navajo to New Mexico. According to Erik Painter, a Native American historian,
The current Navajo Nation is on a portion of traditional lands, which are between the four sacred mountains. It is in the modern states of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah and is 27,000 square miles, about the size of Holland and Belgium combined. There are over 300,000 enrolled members, most of whom live on or near the Navajo Nation. About 60% speak the language.
Shiprock rises 1,583 feet above the floor of the high-desert plain.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Raton, New Mexico, was the home of a two-room school that now sits at the El Rancho de las Golondrinas, a two-hundred-acre “outdoor living museum.” The school was originally located along the old Santa Fe Trail and served as a stop for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway.
Photograph of the painting The Old Santa Fe Trail by Frederic Remington, depicting horsemen guiding a chain of ox-drawn carriages. Digitally reproduced by the USC Digital Library.
From the California Historical Society Collection at the University of Southern California
The outdoor museum features not only the Raton schoolhouse but also a blacksmith shop, church, gristmill, and other structures built during the Spanish occupation. Two rooms of the original schoolhouse included a classroom plus an adjoining room where the teacher lived.
In 1885, Larson and his wife, Belle, began teaching deaf students in a small adobe house in Santa Fe. Using their own money, the deaf couple worked to develop and establish a permanent school where deaf and hard of hearing children could receive an education. In 1887, the New Mexico Legislature established the New Mexico School for the Deaf (NMSD). As documented by the school’s own history, this school is the only land-grant school established for deaf students in the United States. Even today the school provides free admission to all students. According to the school’s website, “We continue to honor Lars Larson’s legacy by providing comprehensive educational and support services to New Mexico’s deaf and hard of hearing children and youth between the ages of birth and 21.”
A government-run Navajo Indian school was built in Tohatchi, in McKinley County, New Mexico, in 1901. It was a large one-story brick building. There was a round stone and a tall water tank to one side of the school.
According to Fr. John Mittelstadt, in a document he prepared for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Tohatchi parish, “Tohatchi is a Navajo word meaning ‘where the water is scratched out.’” However, according to Erik Painter,
Tohatchi is not a Navajo word, but an American English approximation of two Navajo words: Tó Haach’i’ Tó means water and haach’i’ is an obscure and archaic word that may be connected with haachaii’ (he let out a cry)—perhaps referring to some long-ago incident. Haach’i’ might also mean “It is customarily scratched out,” referring to the high water level in Tohatchi Wash where a hole dug with your hands quickly fills with water.
The site was chosen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for the second boarding school for the Navajo in 1895. In 1914, twenty-five children were enrolled in the boarding school.
The Ojo Sarco one-room school was located in an isolated mountainous community, and had eight grades and two teachers. As with so many schools in this region, the teachers had little equipment with which to work, so schoolwork was often completed on the blackboard.
Tohatchi government school for Navajo on hill. Digitally reproduced by the USC Digital Library.
From the California Historical Society Collection at the University of Southern California
North Dakota
After the Dakota Territory was organized by Congress, and on the heels of the Homestead Act of 1862, settlement of the Dakotas began in earnest. A second surge in immigration occurred when the Western Pacific Railroad began laying track westward in 1872 and 1873. In the still sparsely settled Dakota Territory, however, one-room schoolhouses were a logical solution to the problem of few or poor roads and scattered communities and homesteads found throughout the Northern Plains. Small schools, sometimes called “country schools” (vs. “town schools”), were set up about every three miles, so that children were within a reasonable walking or horseback-riding distance. In addition, many of these early schools were made of sod since lumber or other building materials were hard to come by.
The first school building in North Dakota was built in Pembina, North Dakota, which is also the state’s oldest town. The school operated from 1875 to 1881.
Across the state, the quality of education varied from one rural school to the next. To top it off, segregation and the lack of understanding seriously diminished the education that the region’s Native American students received. Most Native American students attended schools established by missionaries on the reservations.
However, by the time the territory was officially split into two states in November 1889, there were no public high schools.
Even as the new states worked to certify teachers, most of them were only young girls with little education, some as young as fifteen or even fourteen.
Young Floyd Henderson taught school in Melby, North Dakota, in 1914, after obtaining special permission to teach from the Dunn County superintendent of schools because of a teacher shortage—even though he was technically too young to take a classroom. Following his hiring, in 1915, Henderson attended Valley City Normal School to pursue his certification.
The first school in the Northern Dakota Territory opened in Bismarck in 1873.
An overview of Bismarck, North Dakota’s main street
Digitally reproduced by the USC Digital Library. From the California Historical Society Collection at the University of Southern California
Born in Litchville, North Dakota, in 1897, Fred George Aandahl, North Dakota’s twenty-third governor, attended a one-room country school there. It was a wood-frame building built in 1903 and torn down in 1924. In 1924, it was replaced by a three-story brick building with an imposing bell tower.
The Alderman School District #78 in Jamestown, North Dakota, was built in 1925–26. Eleven miles from Valley City, on County Route 21, it served as a one-room rural school from 1928 until 1959. In nearly original condition, the school was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 25, 2013.
Other towns in North Dakota to construct one-room schools included Aneta, Binford, Bisbee, Fargo, Hannaford, Harwood, Horace, Jamestown, Kenmare, Kulm, Lakota, Larimore, Mayville-Portland, Minto, Montpelier, Oriska, Page, Park River, Sherwood, and Wyndmere.
The Sweet Briar School, in Sweet Briar, was constructed in the mid-1920s. It was built by workers from the WPA (Works Progress Administration, created by President Roosevelt’s New Deal Program) within the state. The school was located in the midst of low rolling hills, where few trees grew, and was unique in its Art Deco styling.
Fargo is the most populated community in North Dakota. Its first school was held in 1872, presumably in a log cabin. The first teacher was Miss Mercy Nelson, and she was only fifteen years old. The second school was held in a hall owned by Francis (Frank) Pinkham. The teacher was his sister, Miss Alvira Pinkham. These early schools were funded by subscription.
In September 1874, the citizens voted to build a public schoolhouse, on a lot provided by the Northern Pacific Railroad. The winter and summer terms were each three months long. As enrollment continued to grow, a second building was constructed. Still later, the school was remodeled and two more rooms were added.
By 1896, there were five public schools in Fargo. Until the students were given the opportunity to name their schools, these five schools were numbered. Eventually, the names of four of the five schools were selected: Washington, Lincoln, Longfellow, and Hawthorne. In 1909, three more schools were constructed: Roosevelt, McKinley, and the Douglas Terrace School.
A Christmas school gathering in the snow at Missouri Ridge Township, North Dakota. Melissa Hunsley, Kayann Short’s great-great-grandmother (wearing black hood) stands at the right of the photo. Kayann’s great-grandmother Short is to the right of her, along with Kayann’s grandfather Russell in front. Note: the children are holding Christmas stockings after their school program.
Courtesy Kayann Short
Missouri Ridge Township was in Williams County. Kayann Short shared that her grandmother Smith was a teacher in the local school. In the photos that follow, she noted that both of her grandfathers are in each. She wrote, “Both grandfathers were full of mischief. The school they attended was called Rocky Ridge, in Section 36 of Missouri Ridge Township. Grandpa Smith was born in 1904 and Grandpa Short in 1908.”
She continued, “In the photo of the barn, my grandfather is the darker-haired boy standing and waving his cap. In the second photo, the boys are, from left to right: Howard Short, my great-uncle; Kermit Smith, my maternal grandfather; a neighbor boy; Russell Short, my paternal grandfather; and another neighbor boy.”
The boys built the barn where they could keep their horses while at school, circa the late 1910s.
Courtesy Kayann Short
The boys are standing alongside the schoolhouse.
Courtesy Kayann Short
Elaine Goodale Eastman started a day school on a Dakota reservation in 1886.
Courtesy Wikipedia
Oklahoma
The county seat of Cherokee County, Tahlequah, lies in the eastern section of Oklahoma only thirty miles from the Arkansas state line. Established as the Cherokee capital by the Cherokee people in 1839, the town became a prosperous and cohesive community. The Cherokee were a progressive people, and the community grew around the town square.
By 1842, Tahlequah had four stores and a thriving business community. The great Indian Intertribal Council of 1843 brought an influx of ten thousand people, with twenty-one tribes represented. The first school opened in 1845 and even a concept of higher education became a reality when the Cherokee Male and Female Seminaries were opened in 1851.
The Cherokee Female Seminary, built at Park Hill, Oklahoma, burned in 1887, but was rebuilt in Tahlequah. It then became Northeastern State Normal School and then Northeastern State Teachers College (now Northeastern State University).
Western expansion reached Oklahoma in the late 1800s. In 1889, a portion of the open land that became known as Indian Territory was opened to white settlement, and those who were able to were offered an opportunity to join in various land races. At this point, the early pioneers to Oklahoma Territory had to make do with what they could bring or build on their own.
The first arrivals came in covered wagons and brought few or no luxuries.
Homes at first were crude, built of raw timber or sod. It was hard to keep them warm in winter, and during the summer, flies and fleas swarmed “like armies.” Windows were square holes cut out of hewn logs, occasionally covered with greased paper.
Reportedly, Oklahoma had 3,638 one-teacher/one-room schools, beginning in the 1890s. Today the Rose Hill School in Perry (built in 1895) and the Pleasant Valley School in Stillwater operate living history programs for students. The Verden Separate School—which served African-American students near Chickasha—and the Turkey Creek School—now in the Humphrey Heritage Village at the Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center in Enid, Oklahoma—are also open to visitors.
Loretta Jackson, the founder of the Loretta Y. Jackson Historical Society, was responsible for saving the one-room Verden Separate School from demolition. She also organized the one-hundredth-year anniversary commemoration of that school. The Verden School purchased a CSAA Landmark Schoolhouse plaque documenting its acceptance into the Country School Association of America National Schoolhouse Registry.
The coming of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad in 1888 to nearby Liberal, Kansas, as well as the coming of other railroad lines, actually helped draw more settlers to Oklahoma. As new railroad towns built businesses along the track—including banks, stores, and lumberyards—they also constructed schools. By the 1920s, there were fifty-three one-room schools in Beaver County alone.
Ash Grove School, or School #45 in Ash Grove, Comanche County, Oklahoma, operated for an eight-month term, beginning in September. The student population generally numbered between fifteen and twenty-two students.
Ash Grove School, Oklahoma
Courtesy Lewis Wickes Hine, photographer/ Library of Congress
When Oklahoma became a state, there were more than 5,500 schoolhouses and 257,000 school children. In 1907, the state constitution provided a policy regarding the adoption of a single textbook. As time went on, the state also worked to standardize rural schools—their construction as well as their curriculum. M. A. Nash, who was the state superintendent in 1922, instituted the Model School Score Card. In 1924, only five hundred schools qualified as model schools rated by their physical environments, including playground equipment, health and safety standards, even school organization and instructional equipment.
Helen Hussman Morris, who was born in 1910 near Fonda, Oklahoma, taught between 1929 and 1935. In a biography written by her daughter, it is clear that Helen loved her job but at times faced a number of challenges; however, she learned to persevere and overcome.
As a junior in high school, Helen began to substitute teach for absent teachers, and then she was asked to take over a first grade class. In 1929, as a senior, she decided to take the two-day exam that would qualify her to teach for one or two years. After passing the exam, she was offered a job by the Orion school board. The Orion school was located in a canyon; it was a simple clapboard school, built in 1895, but much more primitive than Helen had realized it would be.
In contrast to many of the methods employed by teachers of the day, Helen resisted punishing her students too harshly. “The pupils had told her about the punishments used by the previous teachers: spanking with a yardstick, ruler or switch; standing in the corner; standing with the pupil’s nose in a circle on the blackboard; staying under the teacher’s desk; and standing on the floor (standing on a raised platform near the teacher’s desk).”
Oregon
In the 1850s, when the first public schools were formed in Portland, Oregon, free public education was still a new concept. On December 6, 1851, the following advertisement appeared in The Oregonian:
In pursuance of a vote of the Portland school district at their annual meeting, the directors have established a free school. The first term will commence on Monday, the 15th inst., at the schoolhouse in this city, near the City Hotel (John W. Outhouse, teacher). The directors would recommend the following books to be used in the school, viz.: Sandler’s Series of Readers and Spellers, Goodrich’s Geography, Thompson’s Arithmetics and Bullion’s Grammar.
John Outhouse, the school’s first teacher, was paid $100 a month. There were only twenty students. By the third term, however, the population rose to 126 students—with ninety as the daily average attendance. A second teacher was hired, Miss Abigail Clarke. She was paid $75 a month. It was said that Miss Clarke often chided “the boys who were known to ‘make sport’ by tapping on the windows.”
In December 1854, with more students seeking an education, Portland’s school board organized two districts: School District #1 and School District #2. Then, in March 1856, the two districts merged into one. A new schoolhouse was built in 1858.
The Oregon State Constitution of 1859 established a system of common schools. It also appointed the governor to serve as superintendent of public instruction with the instructions that after five years the Legislative Assembly would create an independent office to oversee the state’s educational system.
Today Oregon is home to more frontier ghost towns than any other state in the nation. In these and many other locations are the remains of dozens of historic schoolhouses. At least twenty-six Oregon pioneer schoolhouses are still standing. A handful of these include Lost Creek in Benton County, Center Ridge in Wasco County, Braunsport in Columbia County, Yoder (a Mennonite school) in Clackamas County, and Howard School in Ochoco.
A log cabin, built circa 1856, in the Alsea Valley, Benton County, Oregon, was the site of the first school there. The school was moved around, but in 1909, two schools joined to form a consolidated school district. Both burned in 1930, so a single new school was built, but that school also burned in 1949. Another school was then constructed.
Kings Valley School was founded in 1848. Located twenty miles northwest of Corvallis, Oregon, it is likely the oldest rural district still in operation in Benton County. The first structure was a log building; the second, built circa 1860, was a frame building, first painted red, then painted white.
In 1892, a new school was built, located at the junction of Kings Valley Highway and Maxfield Creek Road. By 1914, a high school wing was added. The school, which now serves kindergarten through fourth grade, has been in existence for more than 160 years.
Located eight miles north of Corvallis, Oregon, sits the one-room Soap Creek School. The school was built in 1935, during the Great Depression. It was the third school to be built on the site.
Pete Johannsen built the school and it is believed that some of the building’s elements, such as the window casings, are probably older than the 1930s, perhaps from an earlier structure. The narrow protected valley was homesteaded in the 1840s and some records indicate that the Soap Creek School was the earliest one established in Benton County. One former attendee suggested that the first school might have been built around 1885.
Charles Olson attended the school, beginning in 1904, and story has it that one day a boy—who was apparently in trouble quite often—“was standing by the stove drying his clothes when the teacher asked him to move so she could put more wood in the stove, which had a lid that swung out horizontally on a hinge. He rudely ignored her, so, perhaps in exasperation, she swung the lid around anyway. It caught him right behind the knees causing him to sit on the hot stove lid with a definite ‘sizzle.’”
Olson told another story about something that occurred when he was twelve or thirteen. Because he and his sister had to tromp through heavily wooded areas where wild animals often roamed, he carried a pistol; he hid it in the woodshed behind the school so the teacher wouldn’t find it. However, one day he stopped to talk to his uncle on his way home and his sister walked on. When he finally got home she told him that a large coyote had confronted her, but “she stood her ground until it leaped into the underbrush.”
When a large timber wolf was killed some time later, Olson and his sister wondered if she’d actually come face-to-face with a wolf.
The school districts in Linn County were organized circa 1854, and Rock Hill School District was one of them. The first schoolhouse was built of logs and may have been built before 1853. Many early schools were one-room log buildings. Rock Hill School is located four and one-half miles south of Lebanon, Oregon.
Possibly fifty or more pupils crowded into the small log school, and many lessons were completed through recitation and repetition. One student reported, “We sat on slab benches which were without backs. Each bench was about ten feet long and there were no desks.”
Oak Grove School was built in 1860 and is located west of Albany, Oregon, in farmland among the rolling hills. The school burned between 1888 and 1893, and the school’s replacement was a large white house. Today the school is part of the Greater Albany School District.
The present Rock Hill schoolhouse is the last of five separate structures built; however, records indicate that it may be the oldest of nine schoolhouses in Linn County that are still standing on their original sites. According to Elaine Hart, who wrote about the history of the Rock Hill school for the Linn County School District Rock Hill School History, “The present school building was constructed between 1895 and 1905, but there were four other buildings before. The first building was constructed in 1853 as a log cabin, and the students sat on slab benches without backs. It was destroyed by fire, probably in the late 1860s. The second schoolhouse was an old church building where camp meetings had been held. The third building was intended to be a church building, and was constructed by the Church of the United Brethren in Christ.” It was a frame building begun by the United Brethren Church on an acre of land purchased from William and Lydia Gallaher, but construction was halted temporarily because the church ran out of money. William Gallaher had been the original school’s first teacher. Construction resumed when the school committee joined forces with the church.
From the beginning, the Rock Hill School maintained a close relationship with the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. The United Brethren Church believed in a strong, formal education, even admitting women into colleges in the early 1800s, followed by admitting African Americans to Otterbein College in Ohio. Interestingly, the college president’s home was a station on the Underground Railroad, which helped slaves escape. Even today, according to the church’s website, “We believe that we are educating the leaders of tomorrow and we want those leaders to look to God for guidance in their decision making. Proverbs 22:6 tells us ‘Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it’.”
Late in the spring of 1935, the doors of Rock Hill School closed. In November 1960, the Linn County School District sold the schoolhouse and its surrounding acreage to Norma and Gilbert Morgan for $206. Then, in March 1986, the Linn County Historic Resource Commission placed the structure on the Linn County Historic Register. Finally, in April 1991, thirteen citizens met to develop plans for preserving the structure, and the Rock Hill School Foundation was formed.
The school in Denny, Oregon, built in the 1880s, was named for Owen Denny, who brought ring-necked pheasants to Oregon after serving as the US Consul in China. These Denny School children pose with their sign in November 1919.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Talent, in Jackson County, Oregon, is located between Ashland and Medford. It sits at the confluences of Wagner and Anderson Creeks and Bear Creek. Jacob Wagner filed the first land claim in 1852 and for a time, Talent was known as Wagner Creek.
The first schoolhouse was built along Bear Creek circa 1854, but that school, along with a second—and possibly a third—no longer exist. In 1899, the Talent Elementary School was built near downtown. It is a one-story, wood-frame, classically designed structure, with a bell tower. In 1914, it was converted into the town hall. Today the old schoolhouse has retained its original design, although it is used as a community center.
While Irene Bennett Brown, an author of children’s, young adult, and adult fiction, was born in Kansas, she and her family moved to the Willamette Valley in Oregon when she was nine years old. She attended the one-room school known as Diamond Hill located in the Cascade Foothills. Diamond Hill, for which the school was named, rises up behind the simple wood-framed structure.
Ms. Brown noted that she was the only student in the fifth grade and one of eleven students in the first-through-eighth-grade country school. The teacher was provided a room “in the loft of a shed on a nearby farmer’s property.”
Shaniko, in Wasco County, Oregon, is one of the most photographed schools in Oregon. The town’s history is equally as interesting. Originally it was the site of the Cross Hollows Stage Station and Post Office, run by August Scherneckau, a German immigrant. Because the local tribe—with whom Herr Scherneckau had developed a relationship—could not pronounce his name, they called him Shaniko. When a branch of the Columbia Southern Railway was laid to the old station to transport wool produced by local sheepherders, a new post office was established and called Shaniko.
The town grew quickly. A large, two-story brick hotel was built, complete with heat in every room. A fancy two-story firehouse was also built.
The schoolhouse was built at the north edge of town in 1902. Uniquely designed, it boasted a tall, octagonal entry and bell tower. The building was large and square and its roof slanted from all sides up to a flat top.
Today, Shaniko is only a shadow of a town, although the size and dimensions of the town’s water tower, along with the size and architecture of the school, are clues about the town’s early success.
On the last day of May 1871, the Logtown School District was established in the Applegate Valley in southern Oregon. An earlier schoolhouse had been built of local rough-hewn wood, with handmade benches. In 1876, mostly through the influence of Martin Drake, a new frame school was built, called the Drake School.
In 1897, the district was re-designated the Ruch District. By 1912, the school was deteriorating, and the school board approved a bond to finance a new school. The dilapidated frame building was dismantled, slat by slat, and the materials reused for other buildings. A more substantial schoolhouse was dedicated in May 1914. In 2014, it celebrated its one hundredth anniversary.
The new school featured a bell tower. Two years later a high school was added to the school, but it survived only two years—perhaps because so many of the area’s young men enlisted in World War I.
Located along Highway 66, east of Ashland, Oregon—locally known as the Greensprings highway—is the Pinehurst School. In the mid-1800s, emigrant wagon trains traveled through this wooded area where they had to negotiate the “Jenny Creek Slide,” a steep hill where wagons were lowered while tied to trees, which held them steady and upright.
Aleatha Slater was one early resident who shared her family’s story in the book Pinehurst School: 100 Years of Growing up on the Greensprings, compiled by locals and organized by Sam Alvord. Aleatha’s grandfather, George Washington Riley Bailey, took up land grant property on Jenny Creek. There he built a shake mill and made shakes, shingles, posts, and rails. The family’s log house soon became the first post office and a stagecoach stop between Ashland and Klamath Falls, known as Shake.
In 1908, local residents—led by Charles DeCarlow, Fred Edsall, and Bill Cox—joined together to create the Jackson County School District #94; the district was also named Shake. Located on Beaver Creek, just one hundred feet from where the Ashland-Klamath Falls stage road crossed the creek, the school was built by locals. In 1911, the school district was renamed Pinehurst when Lulu DeCarlow, postmistress, petitioned to change it. The first school was replaced five years later, while the second schoolhouse served the community until 1920. Today the school continues to thrive.
A few important individuals in the history of Pinehurst included Bob and Flora Willis, who ran the school from 1951 through 1967, and Laurie Grupé, who spent thirty years as head teacher.
Other early schools in the extended region included Plush, Paisley, Frenchglen, and Diamond.
Children first attended classes at the one-room Criterion School in Wasco County, Oregon, in 1912, where it sat on the high desert near Maupin. Although the school ceased to operate in 1925, the building remained a community resource, used as a Sunday school, a dance hall, a voting space, and a location for other public events.
Criterion School ceased to operate in 1925.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
In 1953, the building closed and sat vacant for over twenty years. Then, in 1976, the Criterion Schoolhouse began a new life, including a two-hundred-mile journey to the Oregon State Fairgrounds. The school was chosen from a group of more than fifty schools in Oregon to serve as an exhibit for the nation’s Bicentennial Celebration.
In 1906, Miss Ina Stocker and her mother moved to Jackson County from Iowa where she had taught school. Ina took a teaching job at Beaver Creek School in the Applegate Valley. In 1908, she met and married Nelson Pursel. The couple eventually moved to the Yale Creek area.
Reportedly Ina rode to school each day on horseback. She chopped wood to keep the fire going in the classroom’s small wood stove, and—ever enterprising—she occasionally pulled several students across the Applegate River in a trolley to get them to school. Ina Stocker Pursel taught for more than fifty years, forty of them in small schools. She retired in 1958. At age ninety-three, she passed away and was buried beside her husband in the Jacksonville Cemetery.
Medford, in Jackson County, Oregon, was founded in 1883 when the railroad came to southern Oregon. Enthusiasm for the budding community surged and, as noted on its city webpage sponsored by the Medford Landmarks & Historic Preservation Commission, “During that first year several babies were born, a fatal shoot-out took place, the first of many churches organized, a schoolhouse was built, and trains began shuttling freight and passengers to Portland. As if to say ‘we have arrived,’ Medford’s citizens brashly hosted a Fourth of July gala for the whole Rogue Valley.”
The first school was a one-room schoolhouse on South Central Avenue. It was a subscription school and cost $5 for each student to attend. The school’s first teacher was William A. Williamson. The next year, a parcel of land was purchased from C. C. Beekman, and the city built its second school. It was a wood-frame two-story structure; its first principal was Walter Gore and there were three primary teachers: May Crain, Belle Stronk, and Sophia Wilson. As the school grew, more teachers were hired to teach the upper grades. In 1891, the school was moved to West Tenth Street.
By the early 1900s, agriculture and commercial fruit had become the area’s major industry, and Medford became one of the fastest growing cities in the United States. Today Medford’s school district is the largest in southern Oregon.
Henry Clay Tison arrived in southern Oregon with his wife and eight children in August 1897. After settling in the town of Drew, twenty-nine miles east of Canyonville, Tison, along with his neighbors, built a one-room schoolhouse in 1906. Miss Carrie Anderson was Tison’s first schoolteacher and she married Henry Tison Jr., in 1919. Today the school remains the only known hand-hewn log schoolhouse in Douglas County and serves as the Drew Museum.
Nancy Fine also wrote about Harney County’s rural schools: “In Harney County, in eastern Oregon, there are seven rural schools, [and most,] like Pine Creek and others, are one-room; [that is,] instruction takes place in one room although there may be a library, kitchen or gym, etc. One of the schools has a whopping two students registered!”
Nancy stated, “My husband, now sixty-six, attended one of these schools—Frenchglen Elementary. We call them ‘rural schools’ because in town—Burns and Hines—there is a high school, junior high, and elementary school. The rest are out of town, hence rural. . . . Remote is more like it. We are designated a frontier county due to our ‘in-the-sticks’ status. Harney County is ten thousand square miles with around seven thousand people.”
Nancy went on to share: “Another interesting district is Crane, also in Harney County. There, grades [kindergarten] through twelve are all on ‘one piece of dirt.’ [Obviously] to have a public boarding high school is a rarity itself nowadays. The boarding school is in place so the ‘waaay-out-of-town’ kids, such as ranch kids or the students from Fields, which is 102 miles from Crane, aren’t [traveling] for impossibly long bus rides. . . . travel from some areas can be delayed due to drifting snow on highways in winter or dirt roads and mud in spring. There’s an expression here, which is, ‘Wait for the road to tighten up’—meaning wait for the road to freeze so the mud doesn’t swallow up you and your rig.”
In 1867, William Brown, a shoemaker and one of two hundred African-American Oregonians living in Portland, sued the school district for refusing to educate the sixteen black children residing in the city. In response, the “Colored School” opened in the fall of 1867, but was discontinued in 1872 when a referendum supported integration. By December 1873, thirty students out of 1,048 within the district were black.
By the end of the 1870s, there were four elementary schools in the Portland area: Central School (1858–?), Harrison School (1866–?); the “Colored School” of Portland (1867–1872), and North School (1868–?). The cost to educate a student in 1879 in Portland was $24.06.
Schools for African-American students were rarely provided the same materials or financial attention that schools for white children were given.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Linda Jones Weber shared that she attended a two-room schoolhouse in Garden Valley, Oregon, five miles from Roseburg, in the Umpqua Valley. It was called Riversdale and there were four grades in each room, first through fourth and fifth through eighth.
According to Linda, “I started there in second grade, in 1951, and my teacher was Sally Rapp. My third grade teacher was Mrs. Cook and she was Native American. In the fourth grade, the ‘school library’ was a set of three shelves under the windows next to my desk. I became fascinated with books and read every single book in the library.” She continued, “We had both indoor plumbing and outhouses. One day the plumbing broke so we all had to use the outhouses. Three of us came down with polio that weekend, and I was one of the unlucky ones. By the time I reached fifth grade, we had been absorbed into the Roseburg School District. But that little two-room school was the center of our rural universe.”
The one-room schoolhouse in Oakland, Oregon, in Douglas County, was most likely built circa 1910 to replace an earlier school. According to historian Larry Moulton, who compiled a book on Douglas County school history, the first school for the early “English Settlement” community was built of hand-hewn timbers or logs in 1854 or 1855. That first building was located one mile to the south of Oakland, on Oldham Creek.
Other settlers to the area, particularly emigrating Americans, began arriving in the second half of the 1840s and 1850s, spurred on by the opening of the Applegate Trail in 1846. Although not incorporated for many years, towns such as Oakland and others, including Wilbur, Winchester, and Drain, were early communities in Douglas County.
The Oakland school was a rectangular, one-story, wood-frame, one-room schoolhouse set on a foundation of basalt. The interior consisted of a single room with a small foyer and two cloak rooms, finished with beadboard wainscoting. Electric lights and other accommodations were added later on.
Located on Elkhead Road in rural Douglas County, the old schoolhouse sat eight miles northeast of the city of Oakland, in a ravine between rolling hills. In order to preserve it, the foundation along the north and west sides was replaced with lumber and concrete footings.
Last used as a school around 1930, the building was left abandoned and vacant, and at times, used by animals for shelter. Then, in 2005, the Friends of Mildred Kanipe Memorial Park Association began cleaning up the school, and the Douglas County Parks Department removed the deteriorated siding, replaced rotten foundation joists, and placed the building on a new cement block foundation. However, several of the original foundation stones and much of the original foundation still support the building. The Oakland School was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.
South Dakota
Across the plains, whether to the south or north, district sizes generally ran between two to four miles square, but in western South Dakota, districts were larger. General William Henry Harrison Beadle was the leader in establishing educational funding as a part of South Dakota’s state constitution. A Civil War veteran, he served as the territorial superintendent of public instruction from 1879 to 1885. When South Dakota’s constitution was drawn up, he proposed that the sixteenth and thirty-sixth section of each township be set aside for public school use.
By 1916, there were 5,011 one-room schools across the eighty thousand square miles representing the state of South Dakota. Often these schools also served as community halls or churches, where weddings and baptisms and funerals were held. At the Lame Johnny School in South Dakota, denominations gathered together for joint services on Sunday. In Kingsbury County, South Dakota, the Congregational Church met for twenty years in the Brown School, while the Bethel Mennonite Church in Marion met at the West Vermillion School from 1883 until 1892. Even during the Depression, hungry children looked forward to the noon meal served at school, although more than a thousand one-room schools closed in South Dakota during the Depression.
Conditions were met with resilience by those who settled across the state. As described by one teacher, Julia Hall, in Memoirs of South Dakota Retired Teachers, in 1976, “My bedroom was an unfinished attic room with an outside stairway which at times was slick with ice and snow . . . the room was heated with a small wood and coal stove. . . . I kept my clothes under the covers so they would be warm in the morning; sometimes my bed was covered with snow. I would go downstairs to wash, eat breakfast and take my school bag and pail to start walking the one and a half miles to school.”
With regard to Native American education, South Dakota State Superintendent Charles H. Lugg reported in 1916, “The non-white population of the state is almost wholly Indian, and the illiterates among the Indians are still wards of the federal government for whom our schools are not responsible.”
As in other states, Native American students attended boarding schools. Such schools required the boys to cut their hair, cropping it close to the scalp, while girls were made to wear tightly buttoned dresses that covered them from neckline to ankle. While 95 percent of the Native American students returned home to their families, they were caught between two worlds.
Some of these Indian schools were given unique names. For example, schools on the Pine Ridge reservation included Red Shirt Table, Wakpamini, Wounded Knee, Lone Man, and Porcupine. On the Cheyenne River reservation, there were Red Scaffold, Bridger, Iron Lightning, Thunder Butte, Four Bear, Green Brass, Bear Creek, Moreau River, and White Horse Schools.
As boarding schools and missionary schools were replaced by day schools, a more serious attempt to keep students in their own communities began in the 1930s. During the Depression, teachers came from all over the country to teach at reservation schools. However, since most of the children spoke Lakota, and as few as two or three out of fifty students spoke English, communication between the pupils and English-speaking teachers was strained and sometimes impossible. Schoolbooks reflected a culture that was foreign. Discipline was difficult and attendance was erratic. For Native Americans, as well as for African-American children, school was often a frightening place. Moreover, minority schools lacked the materials afforded white school children.
With the coming of World War I, schools were also facing the ugly clouds of discrimination and fear against German and, in many places, Italian immigrants. Interestingly, in 1915, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis gave a speech on “true Americanism.” He stated, “He (the immigrant) must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment. Only when this has been done will he possess the national consciousness of an American.”
In 1919, South Dakota passed the Americanization Act, which required that all students between sixteen and twenty-one who could not speak or read or write in English attend day or night school. The state paid one-half the cost of instruction. Most ethnic groups complied, but a number resisted. The Hutterites, in retaliation, sold their lands and moved to Canada. They did not return for twenty years.
Country schools in South Dakota assisted in teaching immigrants. Michael M. Guhin established the Young Citizens League (YCL). He had reportedly borrowed the concept from a Minnesota education bulletin, The Little Citizens League. Hoping to encourage cultural assimilation and strong cultural values, he started a YCL chapter in Brown County while acting as county superintendent of schools. In 1919, Guhin was appointed state director of Americanization, under the direction of South Dakota’s superintendent of public instruction.
The Old School at Volga, South Dakota
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
While YCLs were created in neighboring states, the league remained most popular in South and North Dakota. Forty chapters were set up in Brown County alone by 1915. By 1927, YCL reported over 3,400 chapters, with over sixty thousand members. In 1925, South Dakota’s superintendents voted to make YCL chapters mandatory for all public schools in the state. The groups sponsored projects and helped to bring improvements and innovations into the schools through volunteerism and fund-raising.
Evelyn Myers Sharping, a student at the Swanson School in Brule County in 1931, recalled her YCL experience in One-Room Country School: South Dakota Stories: “On bad days we played Hide the Thimble or games at the blackboard such as Cat and Hangman. . . . With our YCL money we bought a Carrom (a tabletop multiple game) board. We also purchased a Monopoly set. The game took so long that we would just leave it all set up and continue from where we had left off at the last recess.”
The YCL “march song” became well known; the chorus included these words:
In all the winds of heaven
There breathes a patriot’s creed…
Clean hearts and minds and bodies
Serve best our country’s need
The YCL promoted patriotism as well as helped to establish moral and socially conscious citizens. With the decline of rural schools following World War II, YCL membership declined and eventually faded away.
School programs were an important part of life for the children and community alike. At Clark School, in Douglas County, South Dakota, the attendance at one school event was so thick that the gas lamps around the room would not burn because there was too little oxygen left in the room. Many children witnessed their first sight of a Christmas tree or Christmas decorations at school programs. Even when blizzards hit the plains, parents crowded into the schoolroom for such important events. Oftentimes whole families had to sleep on the floor of the school if the weather was too bad to make their way home.
Eleanore Rowan Moe, who attended the Rowan School in Sanborn County from 1926 to 1933, shared a Christmas story in One-Room Country School: South Dakota Stories, “How thrilling the Christmas tree was—towering far above our heads. It was so much larger than anyone had at home, its branches covered with REAL candles. . . . Our home Christmas tree was a huge tumbleweed which Mother covered with sparkling starch. We drew names for presents, but we exchanged names again and again to get the name we really wanted. Gradually packages were sneaked under the pine branches and candles were checked and double-checked for safety.”
Another South Dakota student from Sanborn County, Gladys Brewick, shared her story: “Each lady (or girl) would decorate a box, usually a shoe box, and fill it with all sorts of goodies to eat. The identity of the box-maker was kept a secret. These boxes were auctioned off by some man from the neighborhood, and the money taken in would be used by the school for supplies, such as books, maps, gloves, and other things. . . . I must say, too, that every man who bought a box ate the lunch from that box with the girl or lady who brought it. The teacher’s box usually sold for a good price!”
Texas
The Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836 listed the failure of the Mexican government “to establish any public system of education, although possessed of almost boundless resources” as one of the reasons for cutting ties with Mexico.
The first Anglo-American public school law in Texas was enacted in 1840 and provided for surveying and setting aside four leagues (17,712 acres) of land in each county to support public schools. Later, the state constitution of 1845 provided that one-tenth of the annual state tax revenue was to be set aside as a “perpetual fund” to support free public schools. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, the new state constitution of 1876 set aside 45 million acres of public domain for school support. In 1884, the school law was rewritten, and the Permanent School Fund was to be invested in county schools; other bonds followed to increase income.
According to Betty McCreary, of Austin, the Esperanza (which means “hope”) School was one of the earliest one-room schoolhouses in Travis County, Texas, and was built on property provided by Richard McKenzie in 1866. It served rural children before public education was being provided.
In 1893, when a larger Esperanza School was built on another site, the old log structure was used for other things. The roughly constructed, hand-hewn school was later moved to the Pioneer Village in Austin’s Zilker Botanical Garden. The original log structure received a Texas Historical Marker in 1974 and is furnished to look like a school might have in the 1860s or later.
The first school along the Pedernales River in Gillespie County was actually held in a tent, but in 1882, a new school, the Junction School, was built a mile down the road. Then in 1910, John Pehl donated property for a better school.
As a four-year-old living not far from the rural one-room Junction School in Gillespie County, Texas, the young Lyndon Baines Johnson liked to ride his horse and was often found outside the school, anxious to play with the school children. Then, as one of the youngest students, he recalled sitting in the lap of his teacher, Miss Katie Deadrich, as she read the day’s reading lesson.
Johnson only attended Junction School for a few months in 1912 because the school had to be closed (temporarily) after an epidemic of whooping cough struck the area. The Johnson family moved away shortly after.
The Junction School was a typical one-room school with a wood stove as the only source of heat. Two kerosene lamps hung from the ceiling, and the children sat together at wooden desks, arranged in two rows, with boys in one row and girls in another. The school officially closed in 1947. In 1972, the National Park Foundation purchased the land to become part of the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park.
Helotes, Texas, is home to a school named Los Reyes. From 1871 to 1939, local residents built three one-room schoolhouses. Each of the schools was given the name Los Reyes for the nearby Los Reyes Creek.
According to Helotes author and historian Cynthia Leal Massey, the original Los Reyes was the first school established in the area. Built in 1871, on property provided by Lorenzo Morales, the school was located off Bandera Road about four miles north of Scenic Loop Road.
The first Los Reyes school was replaced in 1882 with a one-room limestone structure built on land donated by Frank Madla, and located about two miles from the intersection of Bandera and Scenic Loop Roads. According to Armin Elmendorf, a former teacher at this Los Reyes schoolhouse, average attendance numbered only six to eight students, ranging in age from seven to twenty-two. Henry T. Brauchle taught at this Los Reyes from 1902 to 1906.
The third Los Reyes and a teacher’s cottage were built in 1912, again on land donated by Frank Madla. The school’s location, however, was convenient for students who either walked two to three miles to school or rode a horse, donkey, or pony.
This Los Reyes schoolhouse was constructed of wood and considered a more modern structure than the previous Los Reyes schools. Although it didn’t have indoor plumbing or electricity (at least initially), it did have a well, separate outhouses (one for boys and one for girls), plus chalkboards, and a wood-burning heater.
In 1939, school trustees decided to merge Los Reyes with the Helotes School; both schools were moved to land donated by Kate and James Riggs, and a third classroom was built that connected the two schools. Today, this school is known as the Helotes Elementary School and is still located on Riggs Road. Both of these schools—Los Reyes and Helotes—represent two of the twelve pioneer schools in the area that were finally consolidated in 1949.
The one-room Helotes School, circa 1908. Fred Wendt’s mother is in the photo (not identified).
Courtesy Fred Wendt
Riding out for a picnic on horseback; note the lunch baskets, hats, and book bags tied onto the saddles. Again, the one-room Helotes School, circa 1908.
Courtesy Fred Wendt
Another early school in Texas was the Clifton (or Clifden) School on Bandera Road in the northeast tip of Medina County. According to early records, Clifden was a planned community that never materialized. It had a post office and a school. From 1884 to 1914, children attended a one-room wooden structure. Mr. John Coleman was the teacher.
In 1914, August D. Schott moved the first Clifton School onto his ranch in Bexar County, which is today the fourth largest county in Texas. The first teacher was Mrs. Euchle, and a series of teachers taught until 1932, when the school burned down.
While planning to build a new facility, a temporary Clifton School was set up in a large metal barn located on the Logan Ranch at the southeast edge of San Geronimo. It was noted that inside the barn there is an “interesting forked center post, where carved hearts and initials of past students, are still visible.”
The new Clifton School was built on the same site as the original school. Uniquely composed of rock, the school still stands on the Howard W. Schott property on Highway 16 at San Geronimo. Fred Wendt attended the stone school for first and second grades.
Today Hank Schott and his wife, Beth (owners of the former schoolhouse), and their two daughters, Brookell and McKayla, live in the rock school.
Betty Lou Schott shared about her experience at Clifton in the 1940s: “I was in fifth grade when the school closed and then I went to Helotes. But I do remember we learned to square dance and we had a Victrola for music. The teacher even came to my house and we practiced dancing. My cousin Peggy Schott was four years older. It was my grandfather (August Schott) who donated the land.”
A 1935 class photo for Clifton School
Courtesy Madelyn and Gary Schott
According to the minutes of a Clifton School Board meeting: “[As of] December 11, 1950, Mr. Galm made the motion that the property known as the Clifton School property be sold to Mr. Howard Schott for the sum of ($1,000) one thousand dollars—with Mr. Schott bearing all expense on Title and Transfer. Dr. Burke seconded the motion. Motion carried.”
A 1947 class photo. Top Row: Betty Lou Schott, Walker G., Benny Martinez. Second Row: First four children unknown. Leora Schott, unknown, Kay Guerra, Yvonne Haby.
Courtesy Madelyn and Gary Schott
Leora Schott and an unidentified child pose at the Clifton School water pump in 1947.
Courtesy Madelyn and Gary Schott
According to Texas author Cindy (Irene) Sandell, “My father’s mother, Paradine Durham, attended a small school called the Cottonwood School. Settlers first came to the area about 1870, I think, and organized the school as soon as they could. They called their little community Cottonwood Hole because of a fresh water spring nearby. (The Brazos River there is too salty for humans or animals to drink, so a fresh spring was important).”
Cottonwood School was a small one-room school.
Courtesy Cindy Sandell
In the photo, taken in 1896, Cindy Sandell’s grandmother Paradine is in the second row, fourth from the left.
Courtesy Cindy Sandell
Cindy also recalled her father telling her a humorous, though revealing, story: “In those first days the school board hired a young woman to serve as the teacher. Anyone who wanted to learn to read could attend the school, so there was no age limit. When some wild cowboys from the Wichita Breaks showed up (who were way too old to be interested in learning), the result was fighting, bullying, and general disruption. Not able to control the chaos, the young woman quit. The community then hired a man. On his first day he showed up fully armed and lay a loaded revolver on the podium before starting class.”
Chuckling, Cindy added, “Things calmed down quickly and the ‘toughs,’ as Dad called them, quickly disappeared. School commenced without a hitch.”
Although the settlement of Waneta, Texas, can be traced back to 1835, the first school came much later; it was called the Red Prairie School and was located on land donated by Augustus Peterson, who had emigrated from Sweden. The school’s first teachers were Mae Rae and Lola Dennis. A few years later the school was moved to William Lively’s place. In 1913, Charles W. Butler, who had purchased land in 1852, donated a parcel and the school was moved again.
Red Prairie School and New Hope School were then combined and renamed the Waneta School. The new school opened in 1914, and to accommodate the school population, a third teacher was added. The oak frame schoolhouse with two chimneys served the Waneta Community until 1949, when it closed. Students were then incorporated into the Grapeland School District.
Wooster Common School No. 38 is believed to be the oldest existing one-room frame schoolhouse in Harris County, Texas. Built in 1894 on Scott’s Bay, it was designed by Quincy A. Wooster on land donated by Junius Brown. Both Mr. Wooster and Mr. Brown had children that were being taught at home by Bertha Brown, Mr. Brown’s daughter. The schoolhouse was built of cypress, and inside the school was a slate blackboard and new desks that had been purchased and delivered to the community by steamboat.
The schoolhouse was also an important community center and meetinghouse. Common School No. 38 became part of the Goose Creek Independent School District in 1919. It was closed and reopened several times, and then in 1980 it was relocated to the Republic of Texas Plaza in 1986, where it was restored. Finally, in 2006 the Wooster Schoolhouse was made a part of a living history museum complex.
Utah
Federally mandated and publicly supported territorial schools emerged with the passage of Utah’s first Free Public School Act by the Territorial Legislature in 1890. However, between 1867 and 1900, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Methodist mission boards established approximately one hundred private elementary and secondary schools, but these gave way as Utah’s free public system took precedence.
Public secondary education did not exist in Utah until the 1890s, but by 1910, 58 percent of the state’s sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds were enrolled in high school. In addition, beginning in the 1850s and 1860s, many of Utah’s grammar schools were organized into wards where the Mormon church meetinghouse also served as the schoolhouse during the week. As the transcontinental railroad made Utah more accessible in 1869, many of the ward schools began to evolve into district public schools.
Webster School in Mill Ward (Maeser, Utah) was built where the old Mud Temple was located before it burned. In this photo, taken circa 1895, teacher Robert Lewis Woodward is on the far right.
Courtesy Vonita Bishop
Robert Lewis Woodward (more often known as RL or Lew) was an enterprising young man who served as an early pioneer teacher in Ashley Valley from 1889 to 1903. According to his great-great-granddaughter, Vonita Hicks Bishop, Robert was born in Fountain Green, Sanpete County, in 1870. He was the youngest of twenty-eight children born to his parents. “They each had children by other husbands and wives, and he had only one actual full brother, Don Carlos Woodward (who also grew up to become a teacher).”
Robert Lewis Woodward, here at age sixteen, grew up in Huntington, Emery County, and there learned to played cornet.
Courtesy Vonita Bishop
When he was sixteen, RL received his teaching certificate, allowing him to teach grade school in Huntington. According to his journal (which he kept religiously throughout his life), he taught thirty students for the term. At seventeen, RL attended Brigham Young Academy in Provo, after which he returned to his teaching position. At eighteen he again returned to the Academy, but after typhoid fever hit Huntington, he returned home to help care for his family. He also fell ill, but after recovering returned to teaching.
RL applied to the Vernal School in Uintah County, but didn’t get a teaching job until January 1889 in Maeser. The log cabin was called the “Mud Temple.” RL taught all grades. Always a musician, he brought his cornet to Vernal, and then sold it to buy a bass viola. The local band often traveled all over to perform.
He wrote about his arrival, “I commenced my journey to Vernal the first of January, 1889, and arrived on the 3rd, there being a wedding going on when I got there. It was very cold coming, being 40 degrees below zero at Fort Duchesne when I stayed there.”
RL also described his first week of school, after being warned by one of the school’s trustees that some big boys would be hard to control. He wrote,
Wednesday was the day to look for trouble. When the noon hour was over I walked from my desk the 60 feet (length of the schoolroom), rang the bell but did not go back to replace the bell on the desk as I had done before. Instead I walked over to a window and listened. The big boys had gathered outside the building and didn’t know I was listening to the plan they had to run me out. I watched them file in as planned. Joe’s toe missed the bucket. As he took hold of it to tip the water out I grabbed him by the seat of his pants, shook him, stood him on his feet. Out of my pocket came the black “gutta-percha” [a type of plastic] ruler and I laid it on his palm a few times. He squawked good.
The other boys stood back. They hadn’t moved. I said, “Now boys, if you care for some of the same I will oblige you. I came to teach this school and you or no one like you are going to stop me.” Levi Bodily spoke up then, “I am with you.” They all filed into their seats and that was the first and last of my trouble.
RL was also progressive. He wrote in the early 1890s, “I had made up my mind that our young folks needed a dance hall so they wouldn’t have to go to Vernal which now supported two dance halls. . . . I got up to speak to an audience called after a Sunday evening meeting. I told them that we wanted 30 teams and wagons and two men with each team to go to the mountains and cut and haul logs into Dan Allen’s mill. Dan had promised to saw the logs for our building. . . . I told them further that the flooring would be furnished us by some good brethren who were also interested in our young folks. . . . In no time at all we had our hall—a good size one too.”
Apparently, Butch Cassidy—known to hide out nearby—liked to come into town when he was in the area to attend the dances. Reportedly the townsfolk liked him and he was always a perfect gentleman.
The hall was used for social gatherings as well as the church, and as a temporary school in Mill Ward while the brick schools of Bingham and Webster schools were built. It was used from 1890 until 1929.
RL married Annie Rosetta Searle in April 1889. Because he was nineteen and Annie was seventeen, they had to get their parents’ permission. Each summer, he attended the Academy to improve his teaching. One time he rode his bike to get to Provo; it took five days.
Regarding RL’s teaching, Phoebe C. Litster, a former student, wrote in 1949,
The best teacher we ever had was R.L. Woodward. We all feared him and we all loved and respected him. . . . There came a time when the trustees and parents got together and with “R.L’s” help purchased modern furniture. How proud we were of those shining new desks; the little inkwells in the top were a wonder; the seats we could walk into and sit in comfort, a place to lean our backs. The teacher’s desk was wonderful too. On it was a globe with the whole world mapped out on it. With his long pointer, Mr. Woodward showed us the different countries as they lay on the globe’s surface. . . . Many were the lessons we were taught and to this day R.L. Woodward calls us all his “boys and girls.” . . . Well do we remember the black gutta-percha ruler, how it hurt when laid on our palms as the teacher held us by the finger.
The end of the log school was a sad loss to all. A fire destroyed the old schoolhouse in March 1892. The next schoolhouse was built of brick.
Taking a bus to Salt Lake City from Vernal, Utah. Robert, Maude and Rosetta are in the middle row.
Courtesy Vonita Bishop
After teaching, RL went on to become a principal in Beaver, Utah, at the Murdock Academy, and his last formal job was in Millard County in the Deseret School District. There he was able to get the towns of Deseret and Oasis to consolidate and then to build the A. C. Nelson Elementary School between the two communities. Later he traveled all over the western states, including Montana, Idaho, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arizona. He delivered schoolbooks to outlying areas and schools.
Grafton, Utah, is now a ghost town, located just south of Zion National Park in Washington County. It is, however, one of Utah’s most photographed towns and has been featured in several movies, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Grafton was first settled in December 1859 as part of Brigham Young’s plan to colonize southern Utah and establish cotton-growing farms.
The town grew quickly, and just as quickly outgrew the little log schoolhouse built in 1862. By 1864, an estimated twenty-eight families had settled there, and each farmed about an acre of land. Grafton became the county seat of Kane County for one year (1866–1867), and then changes to the county’s borders in 1882 placed it inside Washington County.
Though the landscape is beautiful, the area is prone to flooding, and in 1862, flooding destroyed most of Grafton. One resident wrote, “The houses in old Grafton came floating down with the furniture, clothing and other property of the inhabitants, some of which was hauled out of the water, including three barrels of molasses.” Grafton was relocated to a higher location about a mile upstream.
The community’s farmers also had to dredge irrigation ditches frequently to clean out the silt from the river.
Still the pioneers persisted, and in 1886, Grafton’s residents hauled lumber seventy-five miles from Mount Trumbull and gathered clay from a pit west of town to construct the adobe schoolhouse, which still stands. But when the local ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was discontinued in 1921, the town’s demise was imminent. Grafton’s remaining residents left the town in 1944.
The town’s plight was recognized in 1997, when the Grafton Heritage Partnership was organized to protect, preserve, and restore the community. With cooperation from former residents, the Utah State Historical Society, the Bureau of Land Management, the Utah Division of State History, and others, the old church and schoolhouse were restored.
The Torrey Log Church–Schoolhouse was built in Torrey, Wayne County, Utah, in 1898 as a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints school and meetinghouse. The one-story log structure served as the school until 1917. The log building was constructed with sawn logs joined at the corners with half-dovetail notching. The logs were originally chinked with white mortar. The structure boasted a Greek revival influence, unusual for frontier schools, while the school’s shingled hip roof flared up at the eaves. There was a bell tower over the front door.
The Torrey Schoolhouse continued to be used as a meeting place for the local Daughters of Utah Pioneers chapter until the 1970s. The school was nominated for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993. It has since been fully restored.
In Junction, Utah, education was a priority. Classes were conducted for two years outside before the Fruita School could be built. Even though only eight families lived in Junction, these farmers had large families. The Behunins had thirteen children, and young Nettie, one of them, became the first schoolteacher when she was only twelve or thirteen. Her first class had twenty-two students, three of whom were her siblings, and she taught in her parents’ backyard. She continued to teach outside until 1896 when the school building was completed. Elijah Cutler Behunin donated the land for the Fruita School.
Originally, the school had a flat, dirt-covered roof. A peaked, shingled roof was added in 1912 or 1913. The interior walls were built of chinked logs but later plastered. The desks were homemade, constructed of pine, with seats for two students each. Reportedly, teachers often sat an unruly boy alongside a girl, which was considered a humiliating act.
In 1900, the Fruita schoolhouse was loaned to the Wayne County School District for its first county-approved classes. Nettie Behunin, then twenty-two, was the teacher. She received $70 a month even though male teachers were paid $80 per month. The school was eventually closed in 1941. In 1964, the National Park Service nominated the school to be listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Washington
It’s been documented that schools have existed in the state of Washington since the 1830s, although there is some discrepancy as to which of two men first introduced formal education. Many believe that in 1830, near Spokane, Washington, Spokan Garry, a Native American from a local tribe, returned from a Canadian boarding school and began to teach his people. The schoolhouse was little more than a pole structure, covered over with tule (bunch grass) reed mats. Supposedly he taught from the Bible and other materials he’d been given during his five years at an Episcopalian school.
Others believe that a Yankee schoolmaster named John Ball became the first teacher in Washington when he conducted classes for children at Fort Vancouver in 1832.
In 1836, missionaries Marcus Whitman and H. H. Spalding established a school for Indian children in Walla Walla, Washington Territory.
In 1852, the first real public school opened in Olympia, Washington. This was one year before the new territory of Washington became separate from Oregon Territory.
The first school in Spokane, Washington, was built circa 1878 and was used until 1883. The school was then briefly occupied by Spokane’s first newspaper, the Spokane Falls Review. In 1889, the small frame school burned in Spokane’s Great Fire of 1889.
With the end of the Civil War and the completion of the transcontinental railroad, Washington Territory grew quickly; likewise the number of one-room schools grew. In 1869, there were twenty-two one-room schools; in 1872, the territorial school superintendent reported there were 222 districts, 157 schools, 144 schoolhouses, and almost 4,000 students in the Territory.
Winton Elementary, a one-room school east of Seattle, was built in 1915. The school on Shaw Island, Washington, was built in 1890 and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Interestingly, the first separate teacherage was built in Walla Walla County, Washington, in 1905. The idea—which originated in northern European countries—was soon adopted by many schools throughout the West. Before this time, of course, teachers boarded with families. By 1921, there were forty-three teacherages in South Dakota alone. By the time Washington was admitted to the Union, in 1889, there were one thousand schools across the state.
By the end of the nineteenth century, old log schools were being replaced by modestly sized wood structures, and by the turn of the century, most of the 2,888 schools in Washington were framed in wood. However, in 1908, school districts began demanding that schools be built of stone or brick as protection against fire. In addition, many began to install indoor plumbing.
Pleasant Valley School was built on Orcas Island, in San Juan County, in 1888, before Washington was a state. At various times the one-room school, which was renamed the Crow Valley School, had up to forty-seven students. The school closed in 1918, but it wasn’t until 1987 that it was put on the National Register of Historic Places. Then in 2011, it was deeded by its owners, Richard Schneider and Bud McBride, to the Orcas Island Historical Museum.
Diane Biggar Taylor attended a one-room school near Colville, Washington. Colville is home to the Keller Heritage Center, which features the Stevens County Historical Society Museum, the Keller House, a machinery museum, Colville’s first schoolhouse, a homestead cabin, and a Forest Service fire lookout.
About her school years, Diane wrote, “We had a good teacher and a varied program. We had a different kind of music every morning (i.e.: band, singing, square dancing, marching, etc).
“I still remember how embarrassed I was in the third grade when I spoke up to answer a geography question that the teacher had asked of the 7th and 8th grade classes. I answered before anyone else; it just popped out of my mouth. In those days, you didn’t speak up unless spoken to! I guess it goes to show that I was learning not only my own work but things that the older kids were learning, too. (I had a strange feeling that the teacher was rather proud of me for knowing the answer, although she never mentioned the incident).”
Diane continued, “At recess, we worked on building a log house; the older boys cut down the trees. We probably had the walls up four feet before I had to move from that school. We also played drop the handkerchief, ‘ante over’, flying Dutchman, hide and seek, and other similar old-fashioned games. In the winter, we spent the recess sledding or sliding.”
Diane summarized her experience by adding, “Those were the good old days, even though we had to walk two and a half miles each way. Lots of times my younger sister and I would ride our horse, Jerry, to school and then send him home. (He refused to take us to school in the winter when it was icy). But I can’t remember ever not wanting to go to school!”
Washington’s Oysterville School, built in 1908, shown here circa 1950s
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Betty Trueax McClelland attended a one-room school in first grade. She walked a mile and a half to school. She recalled, “Because we lived at the end of a gravel road, with forest between our home and the other homes, my mom would walk down and wait for me there with my little brother.” As to her experiences attending the small rural school, she noted, “The teacher there let me read ahead, which is why when I moved to a larger school in second grade, I had to reread the books I’d already read.”
Later, when she and her husband moved out to their farm, her kids attended a country school for grades one through six, “with two teachers, a library, and a room for the holiday events. The school had a basement where spaghetti feeds were held to raise money. . . . I am grateful my kids had that experience.”
Prairie View School, in Waverly, Spokane County, Washington, was a little one-room schoolhouse that opened in 1904 and closed in 1936. It was one of at least 130 one-room schools located in Spokane County in the late 1920s, and there were perhaps just as many in Whitman County.
The Prairie View schoolhouse was built for grades K–12, but it was not the town’s first school. In 1881, the first school was a simple log cabin. A few years later the town constructed the Prairie View schoolhouse.
Annie Holtman served as its teacher from 1923 until 1961. According to historian Glenn Leitz, before the school closed its doors in 1937, there were as many as thirty to forty students at Prairie View each year. Thankfully, in 2013, the Southeast Spokane County Historical Society moved the building from its original foundation to its current location.
Cheney Normal School eventually became Eastern Washington College of Education, then Eastern Washington State College, and finally Eastern Washington University.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Wyoming
A thousand pioneer schools once dotted the Wyoming landscape. Reportedly, the first recorded school in Wyoming was established for officers’ and traders’ children at Fort Laramie in 1852. In 1860, Judge W. A. Carter founded a second school at Fort Bridger.
The school at Fort Bridger was established in 1860.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
The first public school, while supported by subscription, was open to all students. It was established in 1868 in Cheyenne, Wyoming. In 1869, two more subscription-supported public schools were opened in Laramie and Rawlins. By 1870, there were four public schools and five day and boarding schools in the Territory, including a subscription public school in Evanston and a private school at South Pass.
In 1871, the first school for Native American school children was created by the Episcopal Church and housed in an old log building at Fort Washakie on the Wind River Reservation. In 1873, the Wyoming territorial government instituted compulsory education for all students, ages seven through sixteen. At this time there were eight public schools and three private schools.
This chapel was built for the Shoshone Episcopal Mission by the Reverend John Roberts. It was originally used both for religious services and as a classroom for the Mission Boarding School.
Courtesy Library of Congress
In 1878, the East Side School was established in Laramie; today the two-story brick East Side School is the oldest public school in Wyoming. In 1879, a school was established at Fort Washakie. Reportedly, there were forty-nine teachers in twenty-five schools teaching a total of 2,090 students within the territory.
The Lower Shell School was built in 1903 in the Big Horn Valley. It was one of the first structures not to be built of logs. The school functioned as a church and Sunday school, and as a meeting hall. It was used as a school until the 1950s, and as a community hall until the 1970s.
Carol M. Highsmith photographer/Courtesy Library of Congress
It wasn’t until 1884 that an adobe schoolhouse was built for Shoshone and Arapaho students southwest of Fort Washakie on the Wind River Reservation. And in 1888, Sisters of Charity from Leavenworth, Kansas started a boarding school in their convent at St. Stephens on the reservation. The Catholic Church ran the school until 1975.
Meeteetse, translated as “meeting place” in Shoshone, is one of the oldest settlements in the Big Horn Basin and dates back to the late 1870s; the town’s post office and schoolhouse date to 1880. In 1881, Meeteetse became a stop on the old Meeteetse Trail, which the army built as a stage and freight road from Red Lodge, Montana.
In the 1890s, Meeteetse became the jumping off place for a minor gold rush to the upper Wood Valley, where, in 1885, William Kirwin discovered gold.
A number of mines were developed, including the Molly Logan, the Smuggler, and the Tumlum. The Tumlum was the deepest mine in the area, at 250 feet deep, and gold was brought up and out by mule.
The gold and silver mining town of Kirwin, Wyoming, located outside of Meeteetse, was founded high on the Wood River in 1885. By 1894, the Shoshone River Mining Company was formed and the company’s ore was being shipped from Kirwin by mule in 1897. Kirwin became a well-established community, with two hundred people and thirty-eight buildings, including boarding houses, a hotel, a sawmill, a post office, stores, and houses—but no cemetery, saloons, or brothels.
In February 1907, several severe blizzards swept through Kirwin, including one that dumped fifty feet of snow. On the heels of that, an avalanche—referred to as the “White Death” of the Rockies—roared down onto Charles L. Tewksbury’s Store. Three patrons were killed. The town’s spirit was broken and everyone but Charles Tewksbury abandoned Kirwin.
The Ayers School, in Wheatland, Wyoming, was constructed circa 1904.
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
In 1903, the Lower Shell School was built in Big Horn County, Wyoming. It was one of the first structures in the area to not use log construction. It was used as a school into the 1950s and as a community hall until the 1970s. In 1985, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
By 1905, there were a total of 18,902 students in Wyoming, attending 716 schools, taught by 797 teachers. In 1934, Wyoming reported a total of 385 school districts across the state, including 1,033 rural schools (with 934 one-room schools). In 1935, the WPA funded construction of twenty-one new schools and ninety-two school reconstruction projects. In addition, the Wyoming legislature established the first funding to equalize spending for poorer schools in the state.