As Americans began to settle the West in the mid-nineteenth century, emigrants hoped to bring education with them. However, homesteads were often miles apart and towns only sprang up where enough trade or commerce provided a reason for their existence. Many settlements disappeared as quickly as they appeared, and transient populations meant fluctuating numbers of people to build, attend, and support schools. Because of the limitations, the number one answer to the question of how to educate the young continued to be the one-room schoolhouse model that had been well established in the East.
Each school was a world in and of itself and reflected the community in which it grew. In Oklahoma and other remote locations where conventional materials were hard to come by, for example, sod homes and schools were commonplace. Other rustic forms of construction included logs, clapboard or board-and-batten, adobe or stucco. Rarely was a wood frame or brick or stone building affordable in the earliest days of settlement.
Sod schools, like sod houses, offered few amenities.
Courtesy Library of Congress
The first Grand Junction School in Colorado
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
In addition to their primitive nature, rural schools rarely stayed open nine months of the year. Generally, there were two terms based on both the ability of students to get to school and their parents’ need for them on their homesteads. The summer term generally spanned the first of May through August, while the winter term spanned November through April. Older boys were often needed in the fields during spring planting or summer and fall harvest, and they could only attend school intermittently, most often during the winter months.
While the summer term might be stiflingly hot in the poorly ventilated buildings, the winter term was probably the hardest on children and their teachers. With freezing temperatures, only students closest to the schoolroom’s single, pot-bellied stove stayed warm, so keeping an entire classroom warm became a full-time job. Families being served by a school were often required to contribute to the woodpile or coal supply. Even then, students had to bundle up in heavy wool clothing, which often caused little bodies to itch and squirm.
Two children heading to school in spite of the snow
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
At the Minersville School, a small schoolhouse located along the Trinity River in Trinity County, California, the new young teacher, Miss Shields—helped by the local miners who lived nearby—had to use “a sled pulled by horses to get the wood down to the school, and they stored it under the building. Then the boys split it in the morning and kept the wood box filled.”
Weather was rarely a reason to miss school, unless conditions made travel absolutely impossible, and then those schools took a long winter break and resumed in the spring.
Even in more seasonable weather, merely getting to and from school was often a challenge in rural areas, for both students and teachers. Even into the twentieth century in some places, terrain, weather, and distance affected travel. Most children had to walk to school; if they were fortunate enough to have a horse, they rode.
George Leffingwell, a student at Brackett Creek School in Park County, Montana, in the 1940s, wrote: “We all rode horses to school and brought our own hay. One family had a five-mile ride to get to school by 9 a.m. Horse racing to and from school was prohibited. However, there was a one-mile stretch out of sight of both school and home, where all kinds of things would happen—from roping another horse’s hind feet to getting a horse to buck by putting snowballs under its tail.”
Another reminiscence comes from a woman named Sarah Secrest, who shared that her mother attended a one-room school in southwest Missouri where Secrest’s grandfather was the bus driver. She doesn’t know if the school was torn down or still stands, but she notes, “Schools in this area were built about five miles apart so students never had to walk more than two and a half miles to school, especially when weather was bad or other conditions kept the children at home. After grade eight they were either finished with their schooling, or they had to board in town to go to high school.”
The school day often went from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and children also had chores to do before leaving for school or returning from school, so days were long. For rural children everywhere, life was composed of adult-like responsibilities, thus education often came in fragmented bits of time. Education for girls was considered far less important than for boys, and many never achieved more than a rudimentary education before marrying or settling down.
A retired naval officer, Norm Malmberg, told the story of his schooling:
I was raised on an Iowa farm, and I walked a mile to the nearby Goldenrod School. When I was five years old we moved two and a half miles to the family homestead. My grandparents who had been living there moved to Essex, Iowa, five miles away, so my parents took over farming their 160 acres, assisted by my grandparents, so then I walked one and a half miles to school. I had a younger sister and an older brother and we each had chores. My duties included tending the garden, about half an acre. I also tended the flock of three hundred laying hens. Each week we took five to thirty dozen egg cases and ten gallons of cream after hand-milking five to eight Holstein milk cows to town. We raised about one hundred pigs for butchering and sold beef from the milk cows’ calves. We fed the pigs a mixture of buttermilk and grain and carried it in buckets to the feed trough.
In winter we often had one to four feet of snow, which had to be scooped away for feeding livestock. Then, when weather permitted, we shoveled animal manure from the feeding areas into our manure spreader for transfer to the fields.
At small rural schools, everyone knew everyone else. Jolyn Young wrote of her time in the one-room Bogus Elementary School near the Oregon-California border: “[Our] small school fostered a family atmosphere, with older kids helping younger ones and the teacher and aide knowing each child and their families. One drawback of a small student population was gathering up enough kids to make a full sports team. At the tender age of eight, I joined the volleyball team and competed against middle-school athletes from larger schools.”
Children at Bogus Elementary playing on the playground
Courtesy Siskiyou County Museum
“Of course, we didn’t have enough kids that were old enough at Bogus to make up our own team, so we joined forces with another small school to form a unique team. I was the smallest, and I was barely able to lob the ball over the net. I rolled up the waistband of my uniform shorts several times so they actually looked like shorts, but thanks to my pint-sized contributions, we had a team.”
Others who talked about attending Bogus included Rose Atondo (whose children make up the sixth or seventh generation to attend Bogus) and Cicely Muelrath. Cicely remarked, “It was the best! Twenty-eight students, kindergarten through sixth grade. It was like one big family.”
Peggy Germolis Denton wrote of her experience at Fiddletown School, “When I think of Fiddletown School, I think of Little House on the Prairie. All the kids were in the same class. . . . There is no way that you can sit there and not absorb, unless you completely plug your ears.”
Mary Cowan wrote, “If anyone thinks we are in a wasteland just because we live in a rural area—this isn’t true. . . . Being exposed to all the curriculum [sic], all the different people, all the different ages—[we were] more like a family, as my mother used to say. In a one-room school, it’s more like a family instead of being in just with your own age group only.”
Lois Kennedy, who celebrated her 103rd birthday in 2017, was born November 23, 1914, in Holman, Missouri, and had two half-sisters, both older. Her mother, who had emigrated from Germany as a young girl, and her father, a farmer, homesteaded in eastern Colorado. When her father decided to become a minister the family lived near the churches he served in small towns throughout Nebraska.
When she was eighteen years old, Lois took her first job, teaching in a one-room school in Nebraska. Her time teaching was also her first year away from home, as she had to board in the home of the school board president and his family. And she still had to walk a half-mile to the school. Each day, as she’d exit the wire gate on the way out of the yard, a gaggle of geese would meet her and “escort” her down to the road, hissing all the way.
After she earned a small scholarship, Lois entered Doane College where she completed two years. Then she went to teach in a two-room school in Colfax, Nebraska.
Miss Lois Kennedy as a student
Courtesy Beverly Wenger
Lois recalled, “Colfax was an interesting community with a number of immigrants.” While there, she lived with a Czechoslovakian family and taught at the nearby school for two years. She then returned to Doane College where she was able to complete her degree in history and English.
Lois Kennedy’s experience was exemplary of many of the dedicated teachers who served small communities all over the West. Laura Cowley’s description of her first year of teaching, in 1920, was recorded in the 1989 Siskiyou Pioneer. She wrote,
I was scared and nervous. . . . It wasn’t so bad. I loved all the kids. There were only about a dozen of them, mostly boys. They knew about me and I knew most of their parents. So it wasn’t long until we had things going great. The kids took turns doing the janitor work. I hauled a can of water to school every day. We all took our lunches. Someone supplied wood, and we made a fire in the old stove in the middle of the room when it was cold. We had programs and invited the neighborhood [and] everyone came. . . . By the end of the year, every child, from first grade to eighth, knew at least one hundred poems that they could recite any time.
Hardships were many for rural teachers, however. Mabel Townsley, who taught in South Dakota in 1899–1900, wrote in a letter to her friend Helen Myers:
When four o’clock comes, I have a romping game of tag with the children (which always makes me wonder at myself); split my kindling (and occasionally my thumb); sweep my dusty little room; close the shutters, lock the door, shoulder my dinner pail, and swing out. . . . When I reach home, I scrub for an hour in a room 8 degrees below zero, with hard, limey water. By this time, it is nearly suppertime. After this meal, where I eat enough for a man, there is only an hour and a half until bedtime (8:30).
The scene inside the classroom was quite different from today’s modern schools, with two second grades, two third grades, and so on. Many of the early frontier schools were ungraded, and students were mixed and seated according to ability rather than strictly by age—though generally younger students were seated in front, older ones in back. Students were promoted to the next level when the teacher believed they were ready.
With everyone seated in one room, children were exposed to lessons many times over, which meant they often learned the lessons of their older companions. In addition, older students were often required to help younger ones so that the teacher was free to perform other duties.
Boys with slates, from In Picture-land. McLoughlin Brothers. 1900.
Courtesy Jenner Family Collection
In many frontier settlements, where even parents were illiterate, school lessons were often conducted orally. Children would repeat the teacher’s oral lesson, in unison, at the top of their voices, especially if the school lacked books or other materials. Sometimes these schools became known as “blab” schools. Performing via memorization, or recitation, was prized and became a popular form of entertainment, as well as a learning tool, as parents came to listen to their children’s lessons.
Along with recitation, reading, penmanship, and arithmetic were often considered the most important subjects and have been referred to as the “Three Rs” of education, that is, “Reading, ’Riting, and ’Rithmetic.” “Ciphering,” or arithmetic, was often practiced orally or on slates (small chalkboards). Since most one-room schools had few pencils and no paper, slates became a standard tool.
William Hart’s slate, from Little Shasta, California. Bell came from Emma Cramer, schoolteacher at Moffett Creek School, Scott Valley, California.
Courtesy Virginia (Ginny) Laustalot
Of course, deportment, or good behavior, was essential in schools. Teachers frequently punished students who did not abide by the rules. Discipline often included spanking—either by paddle or yardstick—or through humiliation. Sitting in a corner, with a dunce hat, or being made to sit outside, was not uncommon. Extra chores might also be required of the misbehaving student.
Little girl seated for misbehaving
Courtesy Gail L. Jenner Collection
Grace Bennett of Siskiyou County, California, related that Chester Barton (born in 1891) once shared about Bill Kleaver’s first day as teacher at the Riverside School on the Klamath River, circa 1910. “The big boys challenged him to a fight and he took them up on it. He came out fighting and had them all laid out on the floor with a few well-placed blows. The rest of the term was respectful and orderly!” Bill Kleaver later became county superintendent of Siskiyou County Schools.
Lee Craig, who attended a one-room school, wrote:
Our teachers had way more than they could do, so kids who bent, twisted, or broke the rules, were invited to stay after school and help. One wall was all blackboard and used for math problems, spelling words, or lists of assignments. The lucky student staying after school had the honor of washing the boards and taking out the erasers to hit them together and knock out all the chalk dust.
The next fun task was to move all the desks, then remove from a large barrel, something that looked like redwood sawdust with a slightly oily substance in it. The mixture was spread on the hardwood floor then swept up again. Afterward the desks were returned to their proper places in the proper rows. It is my understanding that they sometimes got them mixed up and students had to look for their desks the next morning.
After cleaning the floors, the offending student had to bring in wood for the stove (if it was winter), or wash the windows (if it was warm). On occasion, the restrooms needed cleaning as well. It wasn’t too hard for the parents to find out how you did at school. If you came home late with white chalky arms and red hands, “the cat was out of the bag.” What happened at school with the teacher was nothing compared to what happened after arriving home late. The teacher was an “extension” of the parenting process, so if you were in trouble at school, you were in trouble at home.
Elaine Zorbas’s book, Fiddletown Schoolhouse Memories, included several amusing incidents collected from the school. Former student Mitch Lubenko wrote, “If there was any trouble, the teachers took care of it or got to your parents and you didn’t want that. The teachers could spank you. They weren’t scared; they had permission from your parents. That was it! You knew what you could get away with.”
The teachers who held posts in these schools were critical to their communities and always remembered by their students—the good and the bad.