A Woman’s Quest to Visit North Dakota’s One-Room Schools

Kathy Wilner is on a mission. The 75-year-old Midwesterner has taken it upon herself to find and doc the surviving one-room colleges that dot the panorama throughout her house state of North Dakota. Thus far, she will be able to personally account for 721 of them. Kathy, additionally identified right here as “The College Woman,” is the driving drive behind the Nation College Home Challenge, a database of the state’s small rural colleges, created and overseen by the State Historic Society in Bismarck.

A century in the past, half of the kids in North Dakota attended one of many state’s 4,500 small nation colleges. In addition to being locations of studying, the buildings typically served as hubs of group exercise for remoted populations. They have been typically spaced not various miles aside, in order that college students on foot or horseback may get to them in an inexpensive period of time.

By the early years of the twentieth century, the state was already advocating for enhancements to its nation colleges. A 1904 pamphlet issued by the Division of Public Instruction bemoaned the circumstances through which rural college students and lecturers labored, figuring out quite a few shortcomings current in lots of the makeshift buildings. “Most of our schoolhouses are in-built utter defiance of all accepted legal guidelines of heating, ventilating and lighting,” it stated.

However the division’s pamphlet additionally provided various constructive concepts, from the association of images to the hue of the partitions they held on. “Grey, boring inexperienced and tan are good colours,” it claimed. A lot consideration was paid to window placement. “The standard of sunshine launched into schoolrooms ought to be of ample energy to completely stimulate the school of imaginative and prescient … Particular consideration ought to be given to the situation and dimension of home windows, the standard of glass, and the mounting of the identical.” It was additional stipulated that gentle ought to “come from behind and to the left of pupils,” in order to facilitate handwriting. At the least for many who held their pencil of their proper hand.

However training reformers of the time have been fascinated with greater than uniform constructing codes. Many thought that kids attending small nation colleges weren’t as nicely educated as their friends at bigger colleges. Proponents of consolidation cited larger per-pupil prices, decrease commencement charges and underqualified and undertrained lecturers as justification for abandoning one-room colleges. The outcome: decadeslong consolidation of districts, mixed with an ongoing inhabitants shift away from rural areas, hastening their demise. By 1961, simply 817 one-room colleges have been nonetheless in use in North Dakota. In the present day, solely 5 stay in operation.

The College Woman Finds Her Calling

Preternaturally cheerful, Kathy Wilner speaks in a speedy Midwestern clip. Almost each different sentence accommodates at the least one “golly,” “dang it” or “Oh my gosh!” All the pieces is “a lot enjoyable” and “only a blast!” Of the 721 colleges she has documented, she is bound she will be able to nonetheless describe lots of of them from reminiscence.

Kathy’s involvement with nation colleges took root in 2008. Just lately retired and with a lifelong curiosity in household historical past, she was recruited to assist plan the a hundred and twenty fifth anniversary celebration of a one-room faculty with ties to her household. Her nice grandfather had donated the land and served on the college’s first board. Her grandfather was certainly one of its college students. “That faculty has been form of massive in our lives,” she says.

In the middle of her anniversary planning, she realized of an upcoming convention in Bismarck about one-room colleges, placed on by the State Historic Society. “It was great,” she says. “One of many workshops was how one can doc a standing one-room faculty, and I assumed it sounded form of enjoyable. So I went, and that was the beginning of that!”

Looking for Survivors

Initially, Kathy caught near house, making day journeys, with maps in her lap, behind the wheel of her Oldsmobile Alero. She traveled alone. “My husband does not actually assume that is probably the most enjoyable factor on the planet to do,” she says. Out on the roads of rural North Dakota, Kathy was having fun with her newfound ardour in life. “I discovered all these colleges and I simply could not stop,” she says. “I by no means drove by a faculty I did not cease at.” But it surely isn’t sufficient to easily find a faculty for the state database. It’s simply as vital to report particulars in regards to the construction: its building, situation, the supplies used and architectural particulars.

When she’s visiting a faculty, Kathy retains a measuring tape, pencil and paper within the pockets of the apron round her waist. She takes photos together with her cellphone and currently brings a step stool, the higher to see inside home windows. “I lastly bought sensible and put rubber bands across the backside of my clipboard,” she says. “In case it’s windy. Which it’s on a regular basis.”

Encounters with birds, mice, snakes, bugs and barbed wire are inevitable when trudging round fields in the summertime. “I don’t like ticks,” Kathy says. “However you recognize what? I’d have by no means performed this mission if I hadn’t gotten over ticks.” In additional than a dozen years, she has by no means touched poison ivy or stepped on a nail. However she has not escaped fully unscathed.

Working alone sooner or later at a distant location, Kathy was so engrossed in making notes and taking photos that she didn’t discover the large gap instantly in her path. All of a sudden, she was on the bottom, wanting up on the sky. “And I laid there,” she says. “And I simply began laughing. As a result of I wasn’t damage. And I assumed, ‘Properly, that is actually silly! Perhaps I would like to verify my cellphone is all the time in my pocket. And perhaps anyone ought to include me.’”

As she ventured farther from house, Kathy got here to depend on locals to point out her round. “I’d name folks and say, ‘If I come, will you get in my automotive and journey with me?’” As a rule, they did. Her husband as soon as questioned her plans to fulfill up with a farmer in one other county. “‘Aren’t you anxious about assembly a person in the midst of nowhere?’ And I stated, ‘No, I am in North Dakota.’”

Street Tripper

Over 12 years, Kathy guesses she has pushed at the least 20,000 miles in pursuit of nation colleges, first in her Oldsmobile, and later in a ‘97 Chrysler. “It was like an enormous boat,” she says of the second automotive. “Leather-based inside, sunroof, the entire 9 yards.” The Chrysler belonged to her mom, who, nicely into her 90s, crisscrossed the state with Kathy on at the least 20 of her journeys, appearing as word taker and preserving her firm. “We have been an excellent crew,” she says.

Kathy was additionally often joined by her pal Karen, from Minnesota, who shares her enthusiasm for highway journeys. With Karen on the wheel, Kathy may consider map studying and writing down her observations between stops. “I ought to have performed that years in the past,” she says. “It might have been means simpler.” Journey prices have been initially offset with a number of thousand {dollars} in grant cash, however for the previous few years, Kathy has just about paid her personal means. “No matter I’ve performed since 2016 got here out of my very own pocket.”

A Transferring Goal

There isn’t any technique to know what number of one-room colleges nonetheless exist in North Dakota. A lot of them have been moved from their authentic places onto non-public property, typically repurposed as granaries, visitor homes and museums. The faculties which can be left untouched will ultimately collapse or be burned and bulldozed to make extra room for crops.

Only a few miles from the place Kathy lives, a younger couple moved a schoolhouse onto their property to forestall it from being burned. “The farmer needed more room for his cows,” Kathy says. “It is like, ‘Gosh, you guys. Do not you perceive historical past?’”

In the present day’s imagined, nostalgic view of life on the prairie could not match the truth. Kathy didn’t attend a rustic faculty. However her husband did and has shared his tales in regards to the expertise. “It was fairly robust for him,” she says. “I believe as a result of I didn’t attend a one-room faculty, I are likely to romanticize it. I believe it will need to have been so cool. After which I believe … perhaps not.”

Kathy Wilner is currently insisting that her days on the highway searching for undiscovered colleges are over. “My faculty mission is actually winding down,” she says. “I will not journey anymore. I’m actually going to overlook all these dusty gravel roads!” However she hopes to maintain listening to from others within the area who want her assist in cataloging their discoveries. Amy Bleier, an archaeologist with the State Historic Society, has heard all of it earlier than. “She retains saying she’s performed. However she’s not. She’s been saying that for years.”

“Oh, gosh,” says the College Woman. “I am by no means going to be performed!”