Tag Archives: Pioneer Teachers

Elizabeth Abbott, a pioneer in kindergarten education in Connecticut

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Elizabeth Abbott

Elizabeth Abbott, a pioneer in kindergarten education in Connecticut

I always enjoy reading stories about pioneer teachers in the field of education. One teacher I read about recently was Elizabeth Abbott, an educator who is widely recognized as a leader in introducing kindergarten to the state of Connecticut.

Elizabeth was born on September 11, 1852, in Lowell, Middlesex County, Massachusetts. Even as a young woman, she was interested in a career as a kindergarten teacher. Her dream was postponed, however, when the death of her father made it necessary for her to get a job. At first she supported herself as a typesetter, a store clerk, a bookkeeper, and then a cook, but her desire to pursue a career in education never diminished.

After seven years, Elizabeth was finally able to secure a position as a teacher in a district school in Maine. Then she tried her hand at running a small private school of her own. Wanting to expand her professional skills, she took educational courses that eventually allowed her to teach kindergarten. She began teaching at a charity summer school in Boston, and then transferred to the Hillside Avenue School in Waterbury, Connecticut.

In 1885, Elizabeth married her sweetheart, George Abbott. Contrary to the custom of the period, she continued to teach. Eventually she was able to operate a kindergarten out of her home, becoming one of the first teachers in the state of Connecticut to do so. In her later years, Elizabeth served as secretary of the Connecticut Valley Kindergarten Association.

After many years, Elizabeth and George moved into her family’s home in Malden, Middlesex County, Massachusetts. For the last 11 years of her life she was confined to a wheelchair. This amazing pioneer in education passed away in Malden on September 27, 1926. She was 74 years old.

Montana’s Lucia Darling: Pioneer teacher of the Wild West

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Lucia Darling

Montana’s Lucia Darling: Pioneer teacher of the Wild West

I always enjoy sharing stories about teachers who were 19th-century pioneers in settling the untamed territories of our country. One such story is about Lucia Darling, a young educator who founded the first school in the state of Montana.

In October 23, Lucia was only 27 years old when she opened her school on the banks of Grasshopper Creek in the frontier village of Bannack, Beaverhead County, Montana. Until a cabin could be constructed to serve as the schoolhouse, the young teacher used the home of her uncle, Sidney Edgerton, who was serving as the governor of the territory. Makeshift desks and chairs, books, and other instructional materials were hastily assembled to serve her pupils.  Lucia’s students were the children of the approximately 3,000 homesteaders and gold miners who had established their claims in the wild and woolly Western town.

In those days, Bannack was tumultuous and rough,” the young schoolteacher recorded in her diary. “It was the headquarters of a band of highwaymen. Lawlessness and misrule seemed to be the prevailing spirit of the place.” Through her school, Lucia sought to inject some semblance of law and order into the community.

Lucia was born in Tallmadge, Ohio, in 1939. Although raised on a farm, she became a qualified teacher and spent nine years teaching in an area of northeast Ohio. She also taught at Berea College, the first integrated college in Kentucky. She did this at a time when it was unusual for a woman to get a college education or go to work.

In 1863, Lucia accompanied her uncle and his family as they moved West. She kept a a detailed diary of the route, the Native Americans they encountered, the historic landmarks they passed, the weather patterns, and the chores she completed each day along the journey. The group traveled by train from Tallmadge to Chicago, by river boat down the Missouri River to Omaha, and by covered wagon across the vast prairies of the West. After three months, the expedition finally landed in Oregon territory. From there Lucia made her way to Bannack, where she founded her historic school.

After the Civil War, Lucia traveled to the Deep South where she taught for the Freedman’s Bureau, an organization founded by the US Government in 1865 to provide educational opportunities for newly-freed African Americans.

Lucia Darling: A true chalkboard champion.

Celebrating Educator and Alaska Pioneer Orah Dee Clark

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Orah Dee Clark

Educator and Alaska pioneer Orah Dee Clark

There are many examples of talented educators who were also American pioneers. An excellent example of this is educator Orah Dee Clark, a teacher who is best known for being the first superintendent for the first school in Anchorage, Alaska.

Orah was born in 1875 in Firth, Nebraska. She first began teaching in 1906, when she was hired by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to teach in what was then the Territory of Alaska. There she worked in a number of remote outposts, including Kodiak, Anvik, Tanana, and the Aleutian Islands. In 1915, Orah was named the first superintendent of the first school in Anchorage. After leaving her position in Anchorage, she helped establish schools up and down the railroad belt in towns, including Wasilla, Eske, Fairview, and Matanuska. She also taught in Unga, Kennicott, Ouzinkie, Takotna, Kiana, Nushagek, and Moose Pass. This amazing pioneer concluded her fifty-one-year career when she retired in 1944. Always a champion of Native Alaskan rights, Orah believed that all children should be integrated into schools that fostered individual growth. Throughout her career, she was a strong advocate for schools where Native Alaskans and white students would attend school together.

Clark Middle School in Anchorage was opened in 1959 and named in her honor. In the early days of the school, Orah visited the campus often. According to reports, the students enjoyed talking with her between classes and after school. In 1962, Orah was awarded the Scroll of Honor by the Cook Inlet Historical Society. In 1980, the school where she served as the first superintendent, the Pioneer School House, was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 2009, Orah was inducted into the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame. Her personal papers are held in the collection of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and the Anchorage Museum holds a collection of photographs she once owned. Every year, the Anchorage Women’s Club awards a high school scholarship for boys and girls named after Orah.

This remarkable educator passed away in 1965.

You can view this view brief public service announcement created about her by the Alaska Moving Image Preservation Association.

Arizona’s Ruth Woolf Jordan: Rural schoolteacher and orchard owner

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Ruth Woolf Jordan

Arizona’s Ruth Woolf Jordan, rural schoolteacher and orchard owner.

There are many examples of  school teachers who became pioneers in the American Southwest. One of these was Ruth Woolf Jordan, a young teacher who taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Beaver Creek, Arizona.

Ruth Woolf was born in Crittendon County, Kentucky, on November 7, 1902. When she was ten years old, her family settled in Tempe, Arizona. As a young woman, Ruth attended Tempe Normal School, now known as Arizona State University, where she graduated in 1922.

Following her graduation, Ruth accepted a teaching position in a one-room schoolhouse in the Beaver Creek School, about 25 miles south of Sedona. As a rural school teacher, Ruth’s was responsible for firing up the wood stove on cold days, cutting her students’ hair, checking in on them when they were absent, ridding trails of rattlesnakes, and playing field games such as softball. To get back and forth to school every day, the young teacher rode her horse.

While teaching at Beaver Creek, Ruth was introduced to a young rancher named Walter Jordan. The pair fell in love, and were married in 1930. After their marriage, the couple settled into a one-room cabin on his land in nearby Sedona. Because local policy did not allow married women to teach school, Ruth gave up teaching and became a farmer’s wife. Eventually Ruth and Walter had three children.

During the 1930s and early 1940s, the Jordans expanded their farm to a total of 65 acres. There they planted an orchard of nearly 1,500 apple and peach trees. At the height of their orchard business, during the 1950s and 1960s, the couple was the largest private employers in Sedona. Ruth worked on the farm and marketed the produce in Phoenix, and in later years she returned to teaching school in Sedona and Red Rock when teachers were needed.

By the 1970s, Ruth and Walter were ready for retirement. They sold their last commercial crop in 1973. After Walter’s passing in 1987, Ruth negotiated with the City of Sedona and the Sedona Historical Society (SHS) to reach an agreement to donate a portion of her remaining property to the city, and to sell the remaining four acres and her home to the city. The agreement granted her a life estate and SHS access to operate a museum in the Jordan farm buildings. After Ruth passed away on January 7, 1996, the city developed the land into a public park, and in 1998 the SHS opened the Sedona Heritage Museum. The museum offers exhibits on local history, cowboys, movie-making, orcharding, and local pioneers, including early women settlers, and their contributions to the community of Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon. The historic Jordan buildings were the first in Sedona to be named to the National Register of Historic Places.

You can learn more about the Jordan Historic Park at the website for the Sedona Historical Society at Sedona Museum. Read more about chalkboard pioneer Ruth Woolf Jordan at the Arizona Memory Project.

Eulalia Bourne: The plucky Arizona teacher who was ahead of her time

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Eulalia Bourne

Eulalia Bourne, the plucky Arizona teacher who was ahead of her time.

I love to tell stories about plucky teachers, and in this blog post I’ll share a little bit about a really plucky teacher from the American Southwest: Eulalia Bourne. This daring educator, whose career spanned more than four decades, taught elementary school in rural areas, mining camps, and Indian reservations throughout Arizona during some of our country’s most challenging periods: World War I, the Depression, and World War II. This women’s libber was ahead of her time, becoming one of the very few women in her day to own and run her own cattle ranch.

Eulalia thought outside the box in many ways. Every year on the first day of school she would wear a new dress, usually blue to complement her eye color. Every school day after that, she wore jeans, Western-style shirts, cowboy boots, and Stetson hats to class. She was once fired for dancing the one-step, a new jazz dance, at a birthday party some of her students attended, because the clerk of the school board considered the dance indecent! She even learned to speak Spanish fluently and, when confronted with non-English-speaking students, taught her classes in Spanish, even though at the time it was against the law to do so.

Eulalia is probably best known for producing a little classroom newspaper entitled Little Cowpunchers which featured student writings, drawings, and news stories about classroom events. Today, these little newspapers are recognized as important historical documents of Southern Arizona ranching communities from 1932 to 1943.

Additionally, Eulalia published three critically-acclaimed books about her teaching and ranching experiences: Ranch Schoolteacher, Nine Months is a Year at Baboquivari School, and Woman in Levi’s. These volumes, although now out of print, can sometimes be purchased at used book stores and can sometimes be found at online sites featuring royalty-free works. These books are well-worth the search, particularly for those interested in Arizona history.

You can read more about about Eulalia’s intriguing life in a book entitled Skirting Traditions, published by  Arizona Press Women. You can also find a chapter about her in my first book about remarkable teachers, Chalkboard Champions.