The following article is from the Hooker County Tribune, December 14, 1995 and the Midland News, November 29, 1995.
Editor’s Note: This article appeared in last week’s issue of the Midland News.
About 58 miles south of Valentine and three auto gates east, near the shores of Marsh Lake, lies a little piece of Sandhills history. It’s a one-room schoolhouse; merely a hutch by today’s standards, but which was, in it’s day a luxury borne of the high priorities placed in education by parents, many first- and second-generation immigrants.
When it was built around 1912, one-roomers were as common a sight as the buffalo that roamed the same hills scant decades before. But unlike the buffalo, which are enjoying resurgence in numbers, the one room country school is quietly; swiftly going the way of the sod house. And like the sod house, many abandoned country schools are being lovingly preserved as a time capsule of the education many remember, and many long for in this ever-changing, megabyte-ridden world.
This little red schoolhouse was once the home of Cherry County School District 66, according to its caretaker, Pat McDuffee Bridges, granddaughter of one of the school’s founders.
In the first decade of this century, Dr. R. G. (Doc) Roth, the man who delivered many of the “old-timers” in southern Cherry County, and other area residents began to see a need for a school in the area. Other one room schools in the county were accessible yet far enough away to create a hardship for the growing populations around the valleys surrounding the Horse and Big Creeks north of Mullen.
Around 1912, District 66 was opened with five students enrolled, Pat’s mother and aunt, Mildred and Elsie Roth, were two of its first students, who rode horseback from their sod house, which is still standing, north of the school.
Pat’s mother, the late Mildred Roth McDuffee, eventually became a teacher in Mullen and surrounding rural Mullen and surrounding rural schools before settling in Broken Bow where Pat was raised. Her aunt, Elsie, grew up to teach in District 66 upon completion of Normal School training in Mullen. Miss Roth eventually went on to become Cherry County Superintendent of Schools. Never failing in her love of learning, Elsie Roth now resides in the Mullen Nursing Home, where she still learns a new word every day.
After nearly 70 years, over 20 teachers and hundreds of little feet trodding upon its floors, District 66 was closed forever in 1981. A few years later, Pat and her husband, Jim Bridges, purchased her Aunt Elsie Roth’s ranch, 10 miles south of the school. In 1987, the Bridges’ and Miss Roth approached the school board with an offer to purchase the school and restore it if it could be moved to the Marsh Lake Valley.
The Board, concerned with the possible cattle damage potential to the school and out of affection to Elsie, presented the school to Miss Roth as a gift for her untiring devotion to the residents of District 66. Pat recalled this act as being one of the most meaningful experiences in her Aunt Elsie’s life.
The school was moved 10 miles with the help of a stack mover and four very patient men: Jim Bridges, his hired hand Johnny Golden, Jim O’Brien and Chuck Anders. It was reportedly a learning experience, and one the men are in no hurry to repeat.
For Pat, the work had just begun. She peeled off the wallpaper to find the paperboard beneath was rotten. Walls were sheet rocked and papered, the floor was refinished, and windows were repaired. The original outhouses and playground equipment were moved with the school and now stand in the one acre tract.
The walls are lined with shelves of books belonging to Bridges, her mother, aunt, and grandfather, Dr. Roth. There are novels, textbooks, travel, inspirational, and how-to books; books of poetry and medicine or any subject one can imagine. Pat hasn’t counted all of the books but she said, “Between the four of us, we’ve got pretty much every subject covered.”
Pat enjoys wading through the old books which include works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Walter Scott and Zane Grey. She especially enjoys her grandfather’s old medical references. “I found a chapter in one book which tells how a woman should look, how she should behave and what is expected of her in public,” she laughed. Pat loves sharing the school with visitors, which have included friends and neighbors as well as people from Sweden, Spain, New York and Washington state, to name a few. She has begun recording a history of the school and keeps a list of the teachers and the students enrolled during their terms. Some of the families included are Marsh, Shears, Sweet, Long, Rice, Sherman, Hale, Wright, Carpenter, and Prentice, many of which still reside in the Mullen area.
Pat has come a long way in her restoration, and plans to resume work again as soon as she fulfills her term as area 10 Representative in the Nebraska branch of the National Cattlewomen’s Association. Pat watches auctions and estate sales for Brooks Readers, a Regulator clock and school portraits of Washington and Lincoln. Her next projects include installing a flagpole (the original school flags “don’t have enough stars”), hooking up the water, planting trees and replacing the green paper chalkboard with slate.
Stan Moreland of Merriman recently donated a slate board and some have donated books but “I really don’t have room for many more books, except maybe textbooks,” Pat said.
Although Pat never got to experience a rural school education, this project has been a labor of love for the ranch wife. Her greatest pleasure is giving piano lessons on the school’s pride and joy, a Behr Bros. upright grand piano, circa 1887.
In December 1993, life was once again brought to the old school as her piano students presented a Christmas program for the community. Steve Dent and Phil Sherman, former students of “Ol’ 66”, were in attendance to squeeze into the seats and reminisce about the teachers and friends they once knew.
Through Pat’s hard work and devotion, one can look upon this little red schoolhouse as a monument to the values and dreams of the ancestors who believed in their children’s education.
As she fingered a dog-eared McGuffey Reader, Pat remarked, “If teachers were still teaching the material in these books, do you think we’d have all the problems we do today?”
By Jean Vackiner