Little School on the Prairie

2012 Oil on Canvas
16″ x 12″ framed in Old Barn Wood
Sold

Located about a mile north of the Kjos farm outside of Fairview, Montana, the Church School – though not affiliated with any church –  was a typical, tiny, one-room country school, having been moved to this location around 1950. The attached lean-to was added as living quarters for the teacher.  It consisted of a tiny bedroom and living room with cooking facilities.  If the students were especially good the teacher would allow them to bring potatoes from home which she would bake in her teacherage. In the school room were desks for the students, who never numbered more than seven. Blackboards, a wall map, the teacher’s desk, chair, a flag, and a Seigler heater were in the front of the room, while the back had an old pump organ.  Water was hauled to the school and stored in the entry next to a wash basin for cleaning hands.  A barn with three doors was also hauled to the site.  The first door was the boys’ outhouse, and the other two were used for animals, while the girls’ was a separate outhouse. There was a swing-set for play.  Subjects were the basics: reading, writing, and arithmetic along with art, and organ lessons were given after school.  Cold lunches and drinks were brought from home.  Since there were no telephones – electricity in the area arrived in 1949 – parents would watch for smoke from the chimney to ensure the teacher was present. Keeping a teacher was not easy in such a rural environment, and some lasted only a few days.

Tales about the students include a boy who stuck his tongue on the metal support of the swing set one cold winter day, and it took a couple of cups of water poured over the tongue to get it loose.  Another describes how a boy took a girl’s newly knitted mittens and threw them down the outhouse’s pot.  The lucky teacher got to fish them out.

In 1954, when the number of students fell to two, the school was closed.  Now a crumbling structure in the middle of the never-ending plains, the little school house seems almost unreal; but if one stands there and listens and dreams just a little, one can almost see and hear those little blond, blue eye Norwegians scampering about and making life difficult now and then for the very young teacher.