Tag Archives: Pioneer Teachers

How professional responsibilities have changed since the 1800’s!

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As teachers ready themselves for the start of another school year, it seems appropriate to spend some time reflecting on professional responsibilities. Usually I read the list of responsibilities for teachers published by the National Popular Education Board in 1872. It’s amusing to see how much things have changed in the last one hundred and forty years. Here’s the list:

  • Teachers each day will fill lamps, clean chimneys.
  • Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day’s session.
  • Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nibs to the individual taste of the pupils.
  • Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly.
  • After ten hours in school, the teachers may spend the remaining time reading the Bible or other good books.
  • Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.
  • Every teacher should lay aside from each pay a goodly sum of his earnings for his benefit during his declining years so that he will not become a burden on society.
  • Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect his worth, intention, integrity and honesty.
  • The teacher who performs his labor faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of twenty-five cents per week in his pay, providing the Board of Education approves.

Awesome.

Chalkboard Champion Eliza Mott: She founded a frontier school in her kitchen

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6afce522c185bef1aa208a6dec7502e0One of the most celebrated pioneer teachers in Nevada history was Eliza Mott, a remarkable educator who is credited with founding the first school in Carson Valley, Nevada. In 1852, this enterprising pioneer wife and mother set up her school in her farmhouse kitchen. Her students sat on bare logs around a crude, wooden table. Armed with a couple of McGuffey Readers, a speller, and an arithmetic book, Eliza welcomed into her school boys and girls dressed in plaid shirts or gingham dresses and home-knit stockings. Some were barefoot and some were wearing rough shoes with hard leather soles. The students in Eliza’ s class ranged in age from five to eleven years in age. Some of the pupils were her own children, and some were her nieces and nephews. 

Eliza was born on January 13, 1829, in Toronto, Canada. Her family immigrated to Lee County, Iowa, in 1842, and it was there that the young Eliza developed her skills as a teacher. She excelled at academic subjects and vowed to make great strides in the field of education. At the age of 22, she met and fell in love with Israel Mott, and on April 10, 1850, the pair were married.

As soon as they were married, Israel and Eliza decided to go West . The fledgling pioneers set out in a Conestoga wagon pulled by two sturdy oxen. In early 1851 they landed in Salt Lake City, where they joined a Mormon wagon train and headed for California, one of a party of thirty families led by the famous frontiersman Kit Carson. When the caravan stopped to rest at Mormon Station in northern Nevada in July, 1851, Israel decided he liked the area so much he wanted to stay there. The couple homesteaded a 2,100-acre section of land along the Carson River route, and on this homestead Eliza established her school.

As more pioneer travelers established their farms in the area, the name of Mottsville was given to the settlement. It quickly became apparent that a school was needed. In addition to her teaching responsibilities, Eliza still had to run the farm. On an average day, the young pioneer woman would rise before dawn to care for her children, milk the cows, cook breakfast for her family and hired hands, prepare lunches for her students, and then complete her lesson plans. By fall, 1855, the Mottsville School had officially outgrown Eliza’s kitchen, and by the next year a schoolhouse was built in town. A schoolmaster was hired from the East, and Eliza resigned as the teacher to care for her family full-time.

This chalkboard champion will always be remembered fondly as the founder of the first school in Carson Valley, Nevada. 

Minnesota teacher, pioneer, and photographer Sarah Louise Judd

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59686592_0_nocropThroughout American history there are many examples of frontier pioneers and innovators who became schoolteachers. One such young woman was Sarah Louise Judd.

Sarah Judd was born June 16, 1802, in Farmington, Connecticut. During her childhood there, she completed her education. In 1832, Sarah’s family moved to Marine Mills, Illinois, where her father established a tavern and her brothers became stockholders in the Marine Lumber Company.

Later, the Judd family became frontier pioneers and headed for the new territory of Minnesota. In 1846, Sarah founded the first school in Point Douglas, Minnesota, and later she founded the first school in Stillwater. The Stillwater school was established in a small vacant log cabin.

In January, 1849, the veteran schoolteacher married Ariel Eldridge. The couple had no children.

In her day, a French citizen named Louis Daguerre invented the ability to take photographs called “dagueereotypes.” The enterprising Sarah established a photography studio in her home town in Spring, 1848. In so doing, she became the first professional photographer in Minnesota.

Following a long illness, Sarah passed away in Stillwater on October 12, 1886, at the age of 84. She was buried in Fairwater Cemetery in Stillwater’s Washington County.

 

Elaine Goodale Eastman: The New England Teacher that Advocated for Her Native American Students

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imgresElaine Goodale Eastman, originally from Massachusetts, was a talented teacher who established a day school on a Sioux Indian reservation in the territory of South Dakota. She believed very strongly that it was best to keep Native American children at home rather than transport them far away from their families to Indian boarding schools. She hadn’t taught on the reservation very long when she was promoted to the position of Superintendent of Indian Education for the Two Dakotas. In this capacity, she travelled throughout the five Dakota reservations, visiting the more than sixty government and missionary schools within her jurisdiction, writing detailed evaluation reports on each school she visited.

It was because of her work that Elaine just happened to be visiting the Pine Ridge Reservation when the tragic Wounded Knee Massacre took place. As a result of this tragedy, more than two hundred men, women, and children from the Lakota tribe were killed, and another fifty-one were wounded. In addition, twenty-five government soldiers were also killed, most by “friendly fire,” and another thirty-nine were wounded. Following the massacre, she and her fiance,  physician Charles Eastman of the Santee Sioux tribe, cared for the survivors and wrote detailed government reports to accurately describe what happened.

In her later years, when America was experiencing a back-to-nature revival, Elaine and her husband operated Indian-themed summer camps in New Hampshire. Read more of the life story of this fascinating educator in Theodore D. Sargent’s biography The Life of Elaine Goodale Eastman, or an encapsulated version in  Chalkboard Champions: Twelve Remarkable Teachers Who Educated America’s Disenfranchised Students, both available on amazon.

 

Alaskan Teacher Etta Schureman Jones: She Was a WWII Prisoner of War

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Chap 7 Etta JonesThere are times when extraordinary circumstances of history present already gutsy teachers with unexpected challenges. This is certainly true of the intrepid Etta Schureman Jones, an elementary school teacher and trained nurse from originally from Vineland, New Jersey.

Etta Schureman was over forty years old when she and her sister, Marie, ventured into Alaska Territory to teach Native American Eskimos in primitive rural schools. After one year, Marie  returned to the Lower 48, but Etta, who had met the love of her life and married, settled permanently in Alaska. The picture here is the happy couple on their wedding day.

Eighteen years later, Etta and her beloved husband, C. Foster Jones, were working together  in the remote Aleutian island of Attu when Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Empire of Japan on December, 7, 1941, “a day that will live in infamy.” The couple and their students were slated to be evacuated by the U.S. Navy when the island was invaded by Japanese troops. Although the couple were in their sixties, Japanese soldiers killed Foster and removed Etta to an internment camp in Japan, where she was incarcerated with a small group of Australian nurses who were also prisoners of war. The Attuan natives, about three dozen of them, were also taken to Japan, with the apparent intention of assimilating them into the Japanese population. Although Etta was rescued buy American troops after the war, and she and the surviving Attuans were eventually repatriated after the war, Etta never saw her students or their families again.

Etta’s intriguing tale of survival is told brilliantly by Mary Breu in her book Last Letters from Attu: The True Story of Etta Jones: Alaska Pioneer and Japanese POW. A fascinating read, to be sure. You can find this book at amazon at the following link: Last Letters from Attu. I have also included a chapter about this courageous teacher in my recently published book, Chalkboard Heroes: Twelve Courageous Teaches and their Deeds of Valor, also available at amazon at this link: Chalkboard Heroes.