19th Century Schoolhouse

From first through sixth grade I attended school in this schoolhouse. Occupying a full block, with playground in front, softball diamond in back and ringed in cottonwoods, the school was a focal point of its tiny North Dakota town. The basement had a big furnace in it and a hot lunch room. We played marbles around the furnace and one of my teachers loved square dancing so much, she gave up teaching us in favor of taking us down to the furnace room, where we learned “Put Your Little Foot,” “Take a Little Peek,” and the “Virginia Reel” to 78 records.

On the first floor were four large rooms, two grades to a room, and upstairs, in one large room was the high school. There were usually about ten kids in my class, not so many kids in high school, probably 30-40 at the most. What is hard to believe though, was that all of us, all ages, sometimes played together. The high school kids probably instigated these games of Red Rover, Pom Pom Pullaway, or Tackle Tag. This would be in the middle of winter, kids in their snow clothes flailing about on the ice-covered yard in front of the school. On February 22, the year I was nine, I wrote in my diary, “We had an awful lot of fun at recess. The boys kept us down.”

It was a pretty homogenous, egalitarian bunch, of course, all of us of northern European origins. Most of the farm kids looked a little more poverty-stricken, and definitely worked harder than the town kids. Kids looked after each other. It would have been considered unsporting for a bigger kid to pick on a little kid. Perhaps there was also that Northern need for people to pull together against the often serious threats from the weather, especially in a sparsely populated place.

The cultural net of family, church, small town and this school nourished and encouraged my small budding self, leaving me without much fear and a great desire to take on the world. Our Dick and Jane readers portrayed a suburban world of newspapers being delivered and Father coming home after a day at the office. It was not what I saw around me. Our world was no less worthy of being in books. I have wanted ever since to celebrate it.