Wexford Wanderings
by Hugh E. Conway
Wexford School
Upon arrival, pioneer families first built a shelter, often in the form of a log cabin. Then, pioneer communities established the essentials for habitation, resources to survive, and a faith community with a church for worship. The family then reached out to nearby neighbors to set up and build a school allowing their children to get at least the rudiments of an education. Iowa has always been a state highly devoted to learning and the development of an effective education system.
Father Hoare recognized the importance of educating the newly arrived Irish immigrant children in this new land of opportunity. When the Irish settlers first arrived, there were between 50-100 inhabitants in the Wexford valley. In 1852, Father Hoare reported that there were not enough children in the area to hold catechism classes. By 1853, Father Hoare reported 153 in the Wexford valley, whereupon he instituted catechism classes, with the first class having 17 children. What good Father Hoare really wanted was for his congregation to be able to read and understand the Good Book, to have the ability to read scriptures from the Holy Bible. In 1854 there were reported a total of 371 parishioners in the farming community of Wexford. By 1855, regular classes beyond catechism class were being taught in the rectory of the Wexford church.
The common assumption of the pioneer immigrants was that everyone needed some type of education. Children should be able to read and write in a democratic society. The public should be literate enough to keep themselves informed on public events to insure that democracy would survive and the people who worked the land could prosper. Children and adults needed enough basic arithmetic to do simple useful (necessary) skills of daily problem solving, such as record keeping of money earned and spent, how to measure land, and how to measure quantities of materials; be it fabric used to make clothes, measuring seeds for sowing the land, or being able to weight food products to purchase. Another important aspect of rural school education was the building of moral character and strengthening of patriotism. The teacher would have students write patriotic phrases on the blackboard, especially during holidays like Independence Day (Fourth of July) and for the Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.
Historically, there is evidence that Congress agreed with the general sentiment of the people on the importance of education by passing an early piece of legislation that helped provide financial support for public education. The Land Ordinance Law of 1785 instituted the surveying of western lands prior to selling of the land to private buyers. West of the Mississippi River, townships were established with six miles on each side using survey lines. Within a square township, there were measured 36 sections with each section equal to one square mile or 640 acres. Section 16 in each township was designated to help support education in the local area. The Continental Congress designated the money from the sale of Section 16 to be used to help support education by helping build a school or pay teacher salaries.
Iowa, which was part of the Louisiana Purchase and west of the Mississippi River, was included. Each new school would then be open to all of the children residing in the surrounding area. The Land Ordinance Law recommended a minimum value of land in Section 16 at $1 per acre resulting in a minimum of $640 for education. Often, the sale of land in Section 16 did not earn enough money to fund local education. Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which included the phrases that “Religion, morality, civic responsibility, and knowledge being necessary for good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
Unfortunately, nearly every early school depended on the support of the nearby families and neighbors of the students attending the school. Often, local landowners would donate the land where the school was located with the understanding that the land would be returning to the landowner should the rural school close and the land be abandoned.
Rural school sites were normally selected in the least productive corner of a section to minimize disruption on the farm. The sites were usually about one acre in size and often fenced off from nearby productive farmland. The school construction became a community project to design and build. Early school buildings were constructed of local timber often likened to log cabins. Later, local cut lumber was used to construct single room rural schoolhouses for classes.
In the late 1800s, school houses were easy to move because schools were often built on skids that made relocation possible with a team of horses or later a tractor. The local community also designated and rotated the duties of furnishing and supplying the needed fuel (local split wood) used in the fireplace and later stoves to heat the schoolhouse in colder weather. The more talented members in the community built the early benches, often of logs, and later the more functional and comfortable school desks.
The original blackboards were just that, boards painted black. These blackboards were later replaced with more functional slate boards. Pieces of soft limestone were used to write on the blackboards, and soft skins, often sheepskins, were used to wipe off the limestone writing.
