A Book and a Revelation

   A present to me from my daughter-in-law, Karen, was this coffee table book:

   She had read of my courthouse odyssey, seen some of the pictures of the older ones I had photographed and thought to give me some incentive to use them.

   The author has traveled all about the state of Montana, hitting all of its 56 counties, taking pictures of one room schoolhouses and documenting the stories of the men and women who have been students there in those places. The pictures are great, but the lives of the people who have attended these schools over the years are captivating.

   Two things catch my interest as I read through the book:

   1. I have been to Montana and had no idea of what obstacles boys and girls growing up in that state contended with to get an education.

   2. The folks interviewed were, for the most part, growing up and going to school in the same era that I was, yet their educational experiences were so completely different from mine.

   Montana is a big state, 4th in size in the US, yet the population ranks 44th in size. Ranching, farming and mining were the ways that many families made a living, and that meant that folks were scattered all over the state. The cities and large towns are few and far between, making the schooling process daunting to say the least.

   Thus the rise of the one room school. Small schools dotted the countryside, serving the people of a particular area. With the advent of better roads and transportation, many of these have been consolidated and closed, but there are still some surviving into 2015.

   One classroom, one teacher, grades 1-8, small student population (often less than 10), hard winters, widely separated family units, kids with chores at home before and after school, wood stoves, well water, outhouses, these are the conditions that stick out in my mind as I read the stories.

   But I also read of boys and girls moving on to high schools in the closest town, high academic achievements, college grads, successful professionals, and most of all, a whole host of people happy with what they received in the way of education.

   Most talked about dedicated teachers, often those who lived in an attached room to the school and no doubt suffered from the isolation of the job, the multiage classroom, the interactive learning of the different ages and levels, the simple things, the lack of bullying, the sense of sharing and helping, and most of all the community spirit embodied in those small facilities.

   Kids riding horses to school, having recess on any day that the outside temperatures were more than zero, lunches warmed on the wood stove, hauling water from the well or creek, outhouses in the winter; how did they cope?

   Well, it seems from the stories and the memories.

   And we, in another part of the same country, never had a clue…

   And it is the same way with the old county courthouses that I see in my photographs, the buildings are neat, but the real stories are the people that they represent. This is the fun part of my project.