Believing in the importance of education, the early pioneers built schools in the towns and rural areas of Aurora County as soon as the voters were able to raise taxes and issue bonds. Initially, the town schools, with a faculty between three and six teachers, separated elementary students into three or four classrooms and offered only two or three years of high school education. The rural schools, referred to as common grade schools, offered instruction for all eight grades in one-room schools taught by only one teacher.
Ella Todd Wilson, who emigrated from Scotland with her mother in December of 1887, attended her first school in America when she was about nine years old and described the school experience in her memoirs.
“School in this new land was also a strange experience. From the great stone building in Edinburg of many big rooms, rich in maps, charts, pictures and other aids, to the little barren wooden building, heated by the big Volcano stove, which roasted those near it, while those in the far corners froze, was change indeed. There [Scotland], school ran eleven months, five weeks vacation, but here not over six months and in many districts, only three.“
“Standards were low, a good teacher, rare in those early days, but attendance was high as most parents were young and families large. Books were not furnished so each child had to buy his own, but many families were too poor to buy them, so books were loaned and often the owner of a book was the one who didn’t have the lesson There were no maps, and all too often, no dictionary, and the blackboards were painted on the board that lined the interior.”
Before the first county elections were held in November of 1882, subscription schools were organized, limiting attendance to those who could afford to subscribe and pay the tuition. Classes were held in homes, churches or rented buildings, often a basic tar-papered shack or even a sod house. As early as 1881, a teachers’ institute was organized in Plankinton and examinations were held to issue teacher certificates. Plankinton built the first school in the county in 1882 but did not graduate the first four-year high school class until 1906. Plankinton School, the largest school in the county, registered 163 students in 1895, employing four female teachers and one male teacher. The enrollment in each of the one-room rural schools between 1897 and 1904 ranged from three to twenty-seven students.
The bond issue for building schoolhouses was hotly debated in 1883. In her history of the county, Florence Payne describes how optimism about future growth influenced the electors decision to build more school houses than were needed at that time, “Many settlers wanted school houses only where there were children to attend them; others held that they were building for the future and that school houses should be located at regular distances apart. The bond issue carried and many a little white school house erected was seldom used for a school.”
School districts aligned with township boundaries and school boards were elected to issue bonds, determine number and location of schools, and hire teachers. Eager to educate their children, township school boards erected several school buildings in 1884. By 1886, the county boasted twenty-one organized districts educating 1,703 students in seventy-two schools. The desire to build schools at regular distances created a seating capacity of 2,390 that served only 1,146 children in 1890. The more populated townships on the eastern edge of the county operated between five and six schools while some of the lower population townships operated only one or two schools.
The effects of the 1890s drought and resulting exodus of families were reflected in the 1897 school census numbers that reported only 889 students in sixty-eight schools. Thirteen school buildings sat unused. When the drought ended, student enrollment and number of schools increased.
In the 1983 Aurora County History book, Kate Krell described the conditions at her school in Lake Township in the late 1890s, “The Hays School was a one room building with a small entry where they could hang their ‘wraps.’ There was a tall coal burning- heater in the center of the room. The drinking water was carried by two boys from the people who lived across the road from the school. One pail full would be the quota carried for each day and all pupils drank from the same dipper. They had a washbasin, a large cake of tar soap, and a roller towel, which the teacher took home to wash when soiled. The parents had to buy all books, they all used slates and were very ‘saving‘ with what little paper they had.”
Two decades years later, school consolidations reduced the need for so many schools. In 1914, Patten Township was the first township in the state to consolidate. Unless they boarded in town, many rural students did not attend high school. To provide that opportunity in Patten Township, the school board included high school classes in the new consolidated school and provided horse-drawn school buses, graduating the first high school class in 1921.
While Plankinton graduated its first four-year high school class in 1906, and White Lake in 1913, the town of Stickney did not add a fourth year to the high school until 1923. Following Patten Township’s lead, two other townships, Pleasant Lake and Hopper, consolidated their one-room schools into new buildings and added high school classes, graduating their first students in 1923 and 1924. Most of the rural high schools graduated between three and seven high school students per year. By 1924, there were six high schools in the county.
Consolidation and declining populations reduced the number of schools in the county from a total of eighty-two in 1894 to only three schools by 2016, one in each of the towns of Plankinton, White Lake, and Stickney. After the 2015 school year, Stickney consolidated their school district with Corsica, educating the elementary students in Stickney and the high school students in Corsica. The high schools in Hopper, Pleasant Lake, and Patten closed in the 1940s. All other rural schools closed in the mid-1970s.
While the number of schools has changed, education today is still a priority for the communities in Aurora County where school boards and citizens provide strong support for good facilities and a robust curriculum. And for the students, today’s schools offer much greater comfort and better equipment than the days with no books, coal-burning stoves, outhouses, and one shared pail of drinking water and dipper per school.
It Happened Right Here: The Little White School House, by Ruth Page Jones. Published in the South Dakota Mail, Plankinton, South Dakota, September 29, 2016.
RPJ Histories - Ruth Page Jones 