While there was and is no way to catalogue all the one-room schools that ever existed across the pioneer West, the journey to locate the individuals who were shaped by them and the unique schools that once dotted the landscape—and still do in some cases—was an intensely satisfying one. People from all over wrote to me to share their families’ or their personal stories and fond recollections of the teachers and schools where they were educated.
The final chapter of this volume, however, cannot be written. Part of this is due to the fact that in some places, the one-room school is not yet fading into memory. In places like Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Alaska, they are still a part of the educational fabric of the state, and in many places, schools are open to serve only a handful of students. However, as former one-room school teacher Lester Newton explained, “The size of a school is/was determined by the days a student was actually present in school. If attendance for the school year averaged less than six, the school would lapse. . . . It took at least seven or eight students to stay above the magic number of six.”
In spite of the extra workload facing the teacher in the one-room school, especially these days, the satisfaction of teachers with their jobs seems to be very high. According to Dawn Shlaudeman, who taught at two different one-room schools in Montana, “Those were the best teaching years I ever had.”
This is a newer photo of the school in Sand Springs, Montana. According to Heidi Thomas, “In recent years, the schoolhouse was moved across the highway to where a new store was built, and a small two-room building was constructed to be used by the teacher.”
Courtesy Sandy Gibson
Shlaudeman shared that she “taught in Sand Springs, Montana, from 1997 to 1998. It was my very first job. I had ten students from three different families. I taught K-8 and had three girls and seven boys. The only thing in Sand Springs was the school, a tiny store/post office, a church, and a farmhouse in the distance.” And even near the end of the twentieth century, the amenities at the school—where Shlaudeman also lived—were few. As she explained:
The Sand Springs teacherage was very cold and basic. It had lots of mice. I remember cooking one night and a little ball of flame came running out from under the oven! I don’t know where that mouse was inside there, but he found his way out. I also remember another time when I was teaching, a paper lunch bag went scurrying across the floor.
I should add that the water was not drinkable. I took showers in rusty water and had to take my whites somewhere else to wash, to the town of Jordan or to my parents’ house an hour and a half away. To get drinking water I had to drive to Jordan sixty miles away.
Speaking of lunches, the mothers would take turns making us the best home-cooked meals on Fridays. A lot of the moms and a few dads would join us. I also had many meals with the different families and once in a while I would go horseback riding in the evenings with some of the kids. The families made me feel so welcome.
There were about ten other one-room schools in session that year. The teachers would try to get together once a month to exchange ideas. The school closest to me, Big Dry, would join us for Halloween parties, Easter parties, field/track days, and together we put on an outstanding musical Christmas program (a play called “Holly and the Ivy League”).
I loved that job! You were so busy you had no time to get lonely. I had nine grade levels to prepare for with eight subjects each. I also had to teach P.E. and music as well as be the janitor, the secretary, and the principal. It was a great way to start my career. I learned early on how important it is to be organized.
Shlaudeman would go on to teach at the one-room Nye, Montana, school from 1998 to 2002, where she had at most seventeen students. (In 2018, the school served four children.) The classroom was the upper room of a two-story river-rock school building constructed at the base of the Beartooth Mountains. In that small community on the Stillwater River, made up of farmers’, ranchers’ and miners’ families, she was again the teacher, the secretary, the principal, and the P.E. teacher, but a local music teacher came in once a week—and there was a janitor.
Dawn Shlaudeman’s story is just one from the so many worthy and deserving stories of rural schoolhouses and structures—and it represents those stories that have not been told or those stories that are vanishing quickly. To lose this history, however, is an American tragedy. The thousands of individuals—from every walk of life—who passed through the gates and entryways into these schools carry the impact of their small school experiences (good and bad) deep within their souls.
It became quite clear to me in the process of researching one-room schools that the commonality of being a part of such a school was more about character-building and human relationship than about curriculum, or the famous “three Rs”.
Preserving history is no small feat and it makes no small contribution to the total compilation of the American experience. Thankfully, efforts are being made in many locations, on an individual, community, state, and federal level, to capture these experiences. I can only express my hope that more stories and photographs, names and locations can be gathered up by those living in proximity to them. Before the last walls and square nails or mortar falls to the ground, or before the last teacher of vintage schools passes on, it would be a noble enterprise for local historians to go out and collect these fascinating and unique histories.