One-room memories

Sauk Rapids man looks back at his small class, one-room school days

By Bill Vossler

One March, when Curt Ghylin, now of Sauk Rapids, and two classmates were walking on the slough road to his “one-room” childhood school, a skunk popped out of the slough, whipped around and raised its tail.

“I said, ‘We have to be careful so it doesn’t spray us.’ But nothing came out. We were surprised and happy. We thought that was quite a deal,” Curt said.

Curt Ghylin of Sauk Rapids attended country school for seven of his first eight school years. Curt holds a copy of the “Ghylin booklet,” put together by family members. The booklet has school day pictures. Photo by Bill Vossler 

He since has discovered that a skunk will run dry after five or so sprays, and won’t refill for about two weeks afterwards. It is one of his many school year memories.

North Dakota law required sections 16 and 36 of every township had to have a school, most of them one-roomers.

“We lived on the northwest quarter of the section, and the school was in the southeast corner of section 16, so it was about a mile walk across the fields if there wasn’t too much snow,” he said. “It was fun to walk across the fields like that, although a couple of times during the winter we would have had to walk through too much snow to get to school, so instead we’d go around the road on the section line, where we met the skunk. That walk was a bit longer.”

He said the slough was full of wildlife, “Like ducks, muskrats, foxes, pheasants--and skunks.” Curt said he always walked, even in bad weather or if the roads were bad. “But if my folks were going to town they dropped me off a few times. There was always a teacher there when the teacherage was used, a small building with one bedroom and a kitchen where the teacher lived. Mrs. Patton lived down there when I was first in school.”

“One-room” is in quotes because Canfield School in Canfield Township in central North Dakota actually had three classrooms, but only one was used while Curt attended.

“When I was a first grader, the building was so big with three rooms, but we only used one room, and Barney Strand, a 7th grader, told me the reason why was because there were lots of ghosts in the rooms upstairs. I believed him,” Curt laughed. “And it scared me for the rest of my life, even when I came back and taught in that school for a year I believed there were ghosts there, and even when I see the old building now when I’m back in North Dakota, I think about those ghosts,” he laughed again.

When Curt’s folks first moved to his growing-up farm, the Canfield School was consolidated.

“It was named after Thomas Canfield, a prominent guy involved in early railroad expansion with the Northern Pacific Railway  who came to the area in the early 1870s, and there’s a Canfield lake named after him a mile south of the school,” he said.

Curt said there were never any discipline problems in the school.

In this photo Curt Ghylin is six and just about to enter Canfield school near Regan, North Dakota. According to his mother‘s writing on the back of the photo, Curt is sitting beside Mary Ollenburger. Contributed photo

“You knew everybody there, and that was your community. People probably knew too much about each other,” he laughed.

The Canfield School had been built by the Regan, North Dakota community, Curt said.

“It was considered rural Regan with a Regan address. It was a two-story with a split level, where you’d go down several steps and be in the gym. Inside were toilets for boys and girls. We didn’t have running water, so there must have been a big septic tank underneath the downstairs. We always had a pail for drinking water in the classroom. Even in winter, so maybe the outside pump still worked during the cold weather.”

A normal school day lasted from 9-4, Monday through Friday, Curt said.

“The school continued until the early 1960s. At that time the small communities of Wing 14 miles away, and Regan, seven miles away from the school, began busing kids from the country into the new town school. That didn’t leave kids for the Canfield School. After that a rancher south of Wing bought the building  and used it for a warehouse. A few years ago I  was driving to Wing on Highway 14 and there  was the Canfield School sitting on the ranch property.”

Curt said at a Regan school reunion one year he was talking to a friend whose father had owned  Tosseth’s Super Value in Regan.

“He said, ‘You know what killed my dad’s business? Busing. Before busing parents brought their kids into town, dropped them off, and visited the store. After busing, they didn’t come into town anymore.’”

The school usually ran from Labor Day to Memorial day, he said.

“With some time off for Christmas. Each year we had a Christmas program, and one year with only six kids in the school, we still had a program.”

He said each May a rural school play day was held in the county.

“That meant track and field events for kids. We’d practice so we could go to the big town to participate. When I was a sixth grader I used to wrestle, and beat this one guy every time. But when I went to Regan and got to be a town guy, I couldn’t beat him any more.”

School days in the one-room school were different than in other schools, Curt said.

“With only one teacher, we heard what was being taught to the other students, and learned that way. Sometimes the teacher would say, ‘Go and help so-and-so,’ and we would. Older kids would help younger kids, though some guys didn’t work as hard as they should have.”

He said during most of his seven years at the school nine students were the norm.

“Always under 10 in one room when I went there. The rooms were probably 40-feet square, with a blackboard all the way around except on the window side. The south was all windows and the north and west wall led to the hallway.”

Recesses were 15 minutes twice a day, and a half hour at noon.

Curt, in the middle of the first row, is 10 years old in 1947, and in grade four at the Canfield school, under the tutelage of his favorite teacher, Mrs. Patton. Contributed photo

“We’d play some kind of games, like tag, which was a big thing, or red rover. But there was a swing set so sometimes we wouldn’t play any games at all. We might play catch. We usually didn’t have enough kids to play softball although sometimes we would have someone bat the ball to us to catch.

Curt said the Canfield school was used for more than just school.

“The gym held barn dances, 4H and Farmers’ Union meetings, and in the 1930s and ‘40s Rev. Rindahl came from Bismarck and had services in the gym. He married my folks in 1925 and baptized me in 1938, so I guess he was the ‘family preacher.’ In the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, the school was a community center.”

In addition to the furnace in the basement, the building also had a stove upstairs, Curt said.

“When Mrs. Patton was our teacher we brought in coal for that stove for her. We also helped clean up the classroom at the end of the day, and somebody always cleaned off the blackboards before they went home. When I taught there we used the furnace downstairs, so the coal was delivered to a coal bin in the basement.”

Curt said he ended up teaching at Canfield “because it was kind of a family thing. My cousin Mabel taught there, my oldest brother Gerald taught there, and when I graduated from high school in 1955 he went to Valley City Teacher’s College where you could get a summer school certificate that allowed you to be a teacher. So I went to Valley City for the summer, and realized if I got that certificate I could also get a state scholarship of $400 for the academic year of ‘55-56 if I promised to teach the following year. So in 1957, I came to teach at Canfield, partly because I was going to be a teacher, but also had to satisfy that scholarship. After my time in the service, I ended up teaching full-time, with business ed and math majors, teaching shorthand, typing, business ed, and math.”

He said music and art were required to be taught in those one-room schools.

“I remember some guys in my class in Valley City getting the certificate were just like me. We knew nothing about teaching music and art, so sometimes I think about how the kids in the rural areas where we taught got cheated out of those classes.”

He was 18 when he started teaching at Canfield.

“It was fun teaching there, partly because some of the students were not much younger than me, and it was fun being around them. I liked the things we did. We always had recesses, but I don’t know how it was academically for them. There were only six kids the year I taught there.”

The county superintendent of schools would come out from the court house in Bismarck twice a year to visit, Curt said.

“Those were very good meetings where Miss Gillen would help a teacher with any problems. Her trips were essentially for quality assurance because some teachers in rural schools were pretty young, like me, and maybe some were not good teachers, so she would come out to check on us.”

Curt said, “I went to school in Canfield in grades 1-3 in 1944-1947, with Mrs. Patton as the teacher. In 1947-1948 the roads were so bad, and we didn’t have any cattle on the farm that year, so we moved to Regan, where my dad did carpentry work, and I passed grades four and five in the same year. Then we moved back on the farm and I attended Canfield for my sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade years. That was as high as the grades went in Canfield.”

As can be seen from this contributed photo, Canfield school, a rural “one-room” school, was quite large, and built in 1916. Contributed photo

Curt added none of his school classrooms ever contained only one grade.

“In Canfield it was 1-3 in the room, then 5-6, and 7-8. When I went to high school in Wing, we had two rooms, one large one where all 55 students sat, and if you weren’t in a class, held in the second room with combined student years, you stayed in the back of the big room. When you were called, you went to the smaller room with other students, but always more than one grade.”

One of the things Curt really liked one of those years at Canfield was having a teacher named Russel Harju.

“At noon he would read some stories from different novels. I don’t know if he considered those ‘great books’ but we thought his reading was a good deal.”

He said he copied what Russel Harju did.

“When I taught I did some reading right after lunch, and the kids enjoyed the stories.”

Curt said many of the kids in the area wanted to be cowboys.

“So I guess one of the things I learned about myself at Canfield was that I really didn’t want to be a cowboy after all and maybe a job like teaching would be better.”