I’ve previously written that my Mom’s mother Selma (1884-1971) and her sisters Christina (1876-1955), Agnes (1878-1971), Mathilda (1882-1955), Nettie (1889-1970), Frieda (1891-1987), and Ida (1896-1923) were all schoolteachers. Their parents had both immigrated in their 20s to the USA in the 1870s (Nils Anderson from Värmlands, Sweden, and Emma Olsdatter from Østfold, Norway) and met and married in Brainerd, Crow Wing County, Minnesota, where Nils worked on the Northern Pacific Railroad.
All of the sisters worked in rural one-room schoolhouses. Schools around the turn of the century typically were clapboard buildings in the middle of nowhere without running water, indoor plumbing, electricity, or telephones. The children, aged from six to sixteen, came on foot or horseback from farms, ranches, or mining leases. The boys typically wore blue jeans and checked shirts and the girls cotton dresses and stockings. They would chat about their chores when school was out: milking cows, splitting wood, gathering eggs, tilling fields, and putting up preserves. Many schools had a merry-ground in the large and flat yard and possibly a slide. The kids were good at amusing themselves with things like tag and pick-up baseball.
The teaching day was some 330 minutes, divided into four periods for each of the eight grades. The day would start with raising the American flag and the children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. During lunch, they may listen to a local radio station if they had a radio. Some of the classrooms were lucky enough to have a piano, which each Anderson sister had learned to play, and many lessons could be facilitated by a song or two. And, of course, the blackboard was essential.
As an aside, when I worked in a mining company in Papua New Guinea shortly after PNG Independence, we wanted to support local education. A jungle pilot flew me to some isolated one-room schools where I was universally told that they needed pencils and copybooks. Most transfer of learning took place when the teacher would write on the blackboard and children would copy everything down in their copybooks. One of our initiatives periodically flooded all schools in the region with cartons of copybooks.
Teachers typically were on a one-year contract in exchange for a small wage worth around $20,000 per annum today and a place to live, usually a cottage next to or near the school. They reported to a School Board usually made up of parents and/or influential locals. It’s no wonder that turnover was high in many schools, with marriage being a common escape valve. Most former teachers looked back on their teaching years as personally very rewarding but very, very difficult.
My great aunt Frieda arrived in the mountain gold mining town of Liberty, Washington, on just such a one-year contract. Nestled into a valley on the eastern side of the Cascade Mountain Range, Liberty liberally experienced all four seasons. The one-room frame schoolhouse built in 1905 was considered the best building in town.
She had a room down the hill next to the Community Hall, humorously known as the “Wildcat Dance Hall”. Liberty was as well known for its dance hall as for its gold, and many Kittitas County marriages are linked to the Liberty Saturday night dances before the building was torn down in the 1940s. Frieda completed her contract and signed on for another. She married my great uncle Al Nicholson, a farming miner or mining farmer, who was on the School Board. She was still teaching when the school was closed and all students were bussed to Cle Elum in 1939.
As an aside, my great uncle Thomas Nicholson who was the bus driver died one day in 1942 of heart attack after delivering the students to school.
