Proud history of rural schools in Albany County. Flexibility required of teachers, pupils, and school boards.
Once there were 24 different school districts in Albany County. They offered whatever classes were needed at over 300 locations in the county. However, not all were active at the same time. District #1 served the city of Laramie with several school buildings, but also operated 11 rural schools. The other 23 rural districts in Albany County ranged all the way from Esterbrook in the north (now part of Converse County) to Mountain Home on the Colorado border.
RURAL SCHOOL HISTORY
It’s hard to pin down when rural schools began in Albany County. The first might have been at Dale City, east of Tie Siding. A landmark there now on private land called “Schoolhouse Draw” suggests one might have been there around 1868 when Dale City had a population of around 600. If so, it was short-lived, for Dale City did not survive long and no recorded history for it was found for the 1976 book “Cow-Belles Ring School Bells.” (Dale “Creek” was a different but nearby school location after 1900.)
Along with the stories from teachers or students, there is a long list of schoolteachers’ names in the Cow-Belles book, as well as students. Recognition is also given to the valiant school bus drivers who braved the challenges Wyoming weather and roads provided.
SCHOOL DISTRICTS
The legislature authorized district formation with a mill levy on district property taxes for support. Eventually a statewide property tax paid for textbooks. Each district in Albany County was managed by three elected school board members—a treasurer, clerk, and president. Income for districts 14, 25, and 28 in the Snowy Range was greatly limited by the scarcity of taxable land. Note that though there were never more than 24 districts, their numbers went up to 28 because new districts did not reuse numbers of districts that had become extinct.
The residents of each district elected their own officers. The officers set their boundaries, hired the teachers, secured a schoolhouse and supplies, and tried to make ends meet. Often that was quite a challenge.
Christena Campbell wrote that some years annual forest land income for the Fox Park area district was “seldom over $30,” with the few ranches in the district bearing the burden of supporting several schools. Campbell was one of the authors in the book cited above that was published under the leadership of Dixie Mathisen and Shirley Lilly of the Cow-Belles as a Bicentennial project. Much of the information for this article comes from that 350-page book.
In 1971 all Albany County school districts were consolidated into just one, ACSD#1; nine other counties are the same, with just one district each. But 13 other Wyoming counties continue to have multiple districts. Fremont County has nine districts, requiring election of nine different school boards.
COUNTY SUPERINTENDENTS
Supervising all 24 Albany County districts became the responsibility of the superintendent of schools. The first in Albany County was Stephen W. Downey who served one year when appointed by the territorial governor in 1870. The next year he was replaced by an elected superintendent, Melville C. Brown. From 1885 on, all superintendents elected in Albany County were women.
Early superintendents served two-year terms, later that changed to four years. In 1903, Mary Bellamy and her successor, Emma Knight found that the job entailed settling frequent boundary disputes among neighboring districts. This could get testy at times, as boundaries changed depending on where the students were. Tax revenues were slow to catch up.
Another complaint was that the elected school boards often failed to report to the superintendent any of the information required for submission to the state—or provided the information too late.
Sometimes both Bellamy and Knight bundled their young children into the sleigh or wagon to go along on the visits to all the county rural schools. Vandalism at the empty schoolhouses was a frequent issue, and there are several reports of Albany County rural schools that burned to the ground, as remote structures often did once a fire got started.
Helen J. Nelson was the Albany County elected Superintendent of Schools from 1937 to 1970. She recalls that when she started, there were 65 rural schools in the county, and 23 school districts. Kindergarten was not offered, and the students were considered finished when they reached 8th grade, unless they could figure out a way to get to town for high school.
The position of County School Superintendent was abolished statewide in 1971 which also coincided with consolidation of all the districts in Albany County. Superintendent Nelson resigned to become the teacher at the Fox Park School.
FINDING STUDENTS
The students in rural schools were and are mostly from the approximately 200 ranches in Albany County. However, there are other families with children in rural areas. Wherever there are kids, someone must figure out how they are going to be educated.
Three miles was about the maximum distance that children could be expected to ride their horse or walk to school after 1900, though it’s not unusual to hear of those who walked four or five miles. Beyond that, the district was supposed to pay a “hardship stipend” to families whose children had to be transported further.
Teachers and school boards in a district scrambled to figure out where the kids were, and how many different schools would be needed and where they should be located to keep costs down. These decisions were made at district meetings usually held in May.
One teacher learned that a new couple had been hired at a nearby ranch. The teacher asked one of the students in her class if there were any children in the new family. The answer was “No, and there won’t be any either, because she’s had her tonsils out.”
TEACHERS
Most of us don’t envy the challenge of meeting the educational needs of children who might vary from first through eighth grade, often in just one room.
In the early days, teachers could be hired who had completed eighth grade and passed a test in handwriting and other subjects. A bachelor’s degree was not required until 1963. However, many teachers attended “Normal School” in the summers to receive at least a two-year normal school diploma.
Most were women, and the joke was that northern Albany County would not have been settled had it not been for the teachers who came mostly to find a mate. The job wasn’t predictable. School terms at first might be two-month segments, though school might be opened again as funds were available. Six months became common for school terms until the state mandated a nine-month school year in 1928.
Pay for teachers varied with districts, but Dixie Mathisen writes that the normal range was from $40-$50 per month. If the teacher boarded with a ranch family in the district, the teacher was expected to pay $15-$20 for room and board monthly. Sometimes this was the only cash that the isolated ranch family earned between yearly markets, according to Mathisen.
Some teachers lived in the schoolhouse, which had the advantage of keeping the building warm overnight so it would not be freezing when the students arrived in the mornings. A presence in the building also helped keep down vandalism—but it was a lonely existence with no close neighbors.
Not all teachers thrived in that environment, turnover was high. Donna Gabrielson Cole writes that when she started in the Harmony Rural School in 1940, she had six different teachers for grades 1-3.
SCHOOLHOUSES
Often the “school” might be the living room of a ranch house if a district couldn’t figure out another alternative. Since many ranch wives had been teachers themselves before their marriage, they were a ready employment pool.
The Cow-Belles book is full of reports of living room schools, often with nearby children attending too, as well as the children in the home school. Towns could mandate that all teachers had to be single; in District #1 (Laramie), married women were not hired until World War II, according to Margaret Page, writing in the Cow-Belles book. However, that was not an option for most rural districts.
Many districts took it upon themselves to fund a purpose-built schoolhouse for the community. With a lack of other public buildings, that school became a center of life in the area, serving as meetinghouse, voting precinct, church and sometimes even as a dance hall.
A prudent school board might make the schoolhouse easily moveable. Such was the fate of the log Marshall Schoolhouse, which was relocated several times in northern Albany County before being brought to Laramie as a Bicentennial project of the Laramie Women’s Club. It is now on the grounds of the Laramie Plains Museum.
Until Rural Electrification that came after the blizzard of 1949, most rural schools depended on daylight, and heating was by a potbelly stove in the center of the room. There were outdoor privies, and water had to be hauled in for handwashing. One dirty-faced pupil was admonished by the teacher for having had egg for breakfast as it was still plastered on her face. “That was on Saturday” replied the child, who got an immediate face-washing.
Gil and Bob Engen, who grew up on a ranch in the Centennial area, recorded an oral history story that one day they decided to play hooky instead of going to school. They rode their horses to the top of a foothill looking down on the Centennial schoolyard. Seeing the tidy schoolhouse and the children at play made them long to be there with their classmates and wonder what they were doing on that hillside. They never did that again.
ANNUAL RURAL DAY
A highlight of the year for rural school students was when they all got together for eighth grade recognition. Rural Day was held at the Laramie High School with entertainment by most rural schoolchildren. It was held on the Saturday following the last day of school, according to Mathisen, and was started in 1927. Programs from some of these Rural Days are among the treasures at the LPM, along with record books from several rural districts.
Rural Day supplied the largest audience that any of the children had ever performed in front of—it was the source of much excitement, “looked forward to by teachers and pupils alike,” says Mathisen. However, the last Rural Day was held in May 1971.
ACSD#1 TODAY
Over 2,000 students on 48 different bus routes are driven daily to schools in Albany County. One bus starts from Rock River, but all the rest of the drivers begin and end their day in Laramie. Middle school students starting with grade six are bussed to Laramie or Rock River to complete their education.
Although kindergarten is not required in Wyoming, it is offered now in ACSD#1 for students who reach age five by September 1. Full K-12 education is available in Laramie and Rock River. The communities of Centennial and Harmony each have a K-5 school. There are two rural schools with just one student each. All other former school buildings in Albany County are closed.
The Fox Park school closed in the mid-1990s and was finally declared surplus in 1999. The two-room log building itself was moved to rural property south of Laramie where it is now a vacation rental property. The gymnasium building was torn down. The community is mainly summer residents now, but if there are children, they are bussed to the closest school.
Many of the writers in the Cow-Belles book recognize that what the rural pupils lacked in socialization with their peers, they gained in individualized instruction and a feeling of belonging to a close-knit community. In many cases, the one-on-one instruction accelerated learning so that rural students were often ahead of their town counterparts.
By Judy Knight
Editor’s note: Judy Knight (je.judy@gmail.com) is Collection Manager at the Laramie Plains Museum. Visit the website wyoachs.com of the Albany County Historical Society for this story and others in this Boomerang history series. The book referenced, “Cow-Belles Ring School Bells” is available for purchase from the Albany County CattleWomen, (contact Knight for information) and is at the UW Library. The sponsoring organization has changed its name to Albany County CattleWomen.
Source: Laramie Plains Museum
Caption: Roll-up screen for the stage in the gymnasium of the Fox Park School. It may date to around 1951 when the school expanded to two rooms; the gymnasium was built soon after. The screen was financed by business ads showing support. The huge screen, about 20’ by 12’, is now stored at the LPM—the rural school closed in the early 1990s. Prices for each of these ads ranged from $4 to $20, according to a draft for it in the archives of the LPM. Note that there is an ad for Holliday’s home furnishing store at the lower left. That business suffered a fire in 1948 that destroyed the entire 400 block of S. 2nd St. (including where Dodd’s Bootery is today, in a post-1948 building). The Holliday store at the time this screen was created had relocated to 320 S. 5th St. which is now occupied by NU2U.