My Guest Author is my dad as he tells about the school houses he attended in his earliest years. When he went to high school, he boarded in town some forty miles away from the heart of the mountains.
School houses didn’t come to our part of Sweet Grass Canyon until 1929. That year Bill Briner and Dump Woods helped the building project at the Brannin ranch. My sister, Ellen, had reached school age and housing was needed for First Grader, Ellen, and Seventh Graders, Jack, Buster, and Billy. A little log building that had once been a winter house for Suzie, a black Jersey milk cow, became a schoolhouse.
The first teacher for the school was a married lady from Oklahoma. Her husband was a gambler staying in Big Timber. She taught about two months with a hand slapping ruler for Ellen, and a better switch for the boys. There was rejoicing when a spinster from Washington replaced her. Ina Wall taught two years. I have a very dim recollection of some of her school classes being held in “Uncle Dick’s House.” Maybe it was just used for special events. I do remember that she had a program there for Thanksgiving. Ellen, Jack, and Billy had parts telling what they brought to the Thanksgiving meal. Billy played an Indian who said, “I brought a deer.” Maybe this is where he picked up the name, “Indian Charlie.” I wasn’t old enough for school, but I had a part in the Thanksgiving program. I said, “I bring an appetite.”
Miss Wall taught Mother to play the piano and pampered the little three-year-old girl with the long curls. Two years later, Miss Wall was sent to another school, and Suzie’s House was pressed into other services. It had been moved several times and has served as a campout for Jim Brannin and his teenage deer hunters, a brooder house for baby chicks, a summer playhouse, and finally as a grainery. It is one of the few original buildings still standing.
“Suzie’s house”
I started school the first year after Miss Wall left. That year, and the next fall, Sister Ellen and I rode the old roan horse (Spider) to Brannin’s. For the last part of my second school year the schoolteacher and cousins Sydney and Margaret rode up to our house for classes in the new addition.
The next summer the bunkhouse was replaced. A crew of bachelors dismantled the old bunk house and set it up for a schoolhouse halfway between the sawmill and the Brannin Ranch. School would be held there for five years. Then it sat idle for at least that long or longer. However, while other abandoned schoolhouses might dot the landscape of the American West the Bachelor School didn’t suffer this fate. In 1948, the vacant schoolhouse was taken apart and moved to the west side of the big hayshed. It served there as a warm shelter for newly weaned calves and for calf-expecting two-year-old heifers.
Ellen is the middle
at the Bachelor School
Here is his story about his freshman year in high school posted previously.