One-Room School House History

Kansas One Room
School House Project
One-Room School House History

The Kansas Heritage Server would like to thank Stephen Chinn and Lynn H. Nelson for contributing this article.

For most of Kansas's history, most people were educated in rural (country) and small town schools in which all of the students met in a single room, with one row of desks for each of the eight grades. A few schools had over fifty or sixty students. There was frequently only one teacher (although art and music teachers would visit for a day every month).

Often enough one of the students would graduate, come back in three or four years with a certificate, and become the new teacher.

They had spelling bees with one school competing against another.

There was one section in every township, one out of every thirty-six square miles, put aside for school purposes.
Each school would serve a district of about three or four miles around it.

When the building was sold, its proceeds went to the improvement of the school houses or to the payment of the "marms" (teacher).

Community Center -- The school house was the center and focus of the thousands of rural communities, hamlets and small towns that composed Kansas. Sunday (Sabbath) school classes and church services (meetings) were held in the school house. Elections (vote/poll) and township meetings were held in the school house. The school house served as a grange hall, assembly hall, tax office, place for dances and box suppers, quilting bees and the like.

These schools began to be replaced by "consolidated" schools as early as the 1930's, but many of them lasted into the 1960's. They have all now disappeared, and the memory of what they and the life that centered around them is beginning to be lost.

Sunday, May 22, 2005 9:02 PM

West Valley -- Franklin County

Arvonia -- Osage County