Prairie Temple School

Submitted by:
Dr. Bernice Webb
159 Whittington Drive
Lafayette, LA 70503
This passage is part of her essay, "I Remember Sappa Valley," published in a 1980 issue of Kansas Quarterly, and is copyrighted material.

Prairie Temple School--Decatur County

A few decades ago I was a schoolgirl, living on a farm in the northwest corner of Kansas throughout the stock market crash of 1929 and the Drought-stricken, grasshopper-plagued, dust-covered Depression years of the 1930s. Living in that location during that period provided a set of experiences that could have come from no other time and place. And we who remember should tell our stories.

The first school I attended was a one-room country school in Decatur County, Kansas. Its single classroom was dynamic with the activities of ten to fifteen children of assorted sizes. Its teacher was busy every minute, crowding classes for grade one through eight into a single day.

The building itself was both distinctive in appearance and functional. Prairie Temple, District No. 13, was a belfried white frame structure set in a corner of a buffalo-grass pasture. Once doubling in service as a church, it boasted a handsome bell in the tower, from which a rope hung through a hole in the ceiling behind the teacher's desk. The rhythmic clang of the clapper could be heard across the miles every morning at 8:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. That sound meant that we kids had half an hour left for our walk to school.

And walk we did. Until the schoolhouse was moved to another site--in actuality, back to its original location, where in pioneer days it had been a soddy structure--it had been located two miles from my home. The road we kids walked led up and down hills, over Sappa Creek, and through two draws that cut in a west-east direction through upland pastures.

On special occasions, though, we rode. Winter, and sometimes early spring, brought blizzards to northwest Kansas, and after a blizzard, snow lay on the roads too deep for kids to flounder through and too deep for automobiles to travel. Those were the days that my father pitched a layer of straw into his lumber wagon, laying a horse blanket over the straw for his passengers to sit on and a blanket to pull over their shoulders to ward off the chill. Then he hitched a team of horses--perhaps Dexter and Daisy, or maybe the mules, gentle Mutt and Molly or handsome Punch and Judy. Picking up neighbor children along the way, Daddy hauled us all to school.

Later in the spring came the rains. We were in a semi-arid region, where the annual rainfall was approximately eighteen inches a year. Droughts were common, and in the 1930s the weather grew even more unkind. Often no more than a sprinkle of rain touched the earth for months at a time. But when a few inches fell, a shallow creek bed or a narrow draw might fill to overflowing. After heavy rains that covered a large territory upstream, Sappa Creek overflowed its banks, flooding our bottom-land alfalfa field and spreading across the county road. Down the steep draws, too, water came rushing, covering our route to school.

On such an occasion, ferry by horseback was a neighborhood custom. After school children got safely across the creek at the shallower crossing, at the bottom of the steeper hill our neighbor, Mr. Walinder, waited astride old Peggy, his saddle horse. Hoisting each child, in turn, up behind the saddle, he transported his passengers across the flooded draw.

Even if the roads were clear, whenever the weather was biting cold, Daddy cranked up the car and hauled a load of children to school. When the temperature was zero, however, it was difficult to coax an automobile engine into action. It became a cold-morning ritual for Mama to heat a teakettle of water on the kitchen stove, and for Daddy, mittened and blowing vapor with every breath, to carry the teakettle out to the garage. Boiling water did the trick with a balky car.

The opening day of school in the fall, when we kids were loaded down with our brand-new or second-hand textbooks, was not a day for walking, either. I remember my enrollment day in the first grade. Because kindergarten was not part of the curriculum, this was my first adventure away from the farm and into a classroom. This was the day when Daddy and Mama together brought me to school.