Thirsty at Bazaar, Kansas

If you go to school in the city, you probably don’t give much thought to the cool water that flows from the water fountain with the press of a button.

Bazaar Schoolhouse, Water Pump

Now put yourself on the prairie in a one room schoolhouse in the late 1800’s and the picture changes.

Well – that’s a deep subject, back then there was no water department, no rural water district. Instead, the water supply for each homesteader was independent from his neighbor’s down the road. Everyone dug their own well, and so too did the school.

The depth of a well in Kansas varies greatly according to location. A well near a river or creek might need to be dug as little as 20 feet or even less to strike water, but a well for a little school house standing on a high lonely hill might need to go down much further, sometimes, more than a hundred feet before striking water. (If you want some facts and figures on wells in Kansas for the year 1895, check out The Report of the Kansas State Board of Agriculture, first quarter, page 109. Notes on some Kansas wells. You can also visit the World’s largest hand dug well in Greensburg, Kansas at at depth of 109 feet, completed in 1888.) BigWell.org

In the earliest days, the water was drawn with a pail on a rope and pulley. But it didn’t take long for a new-fangled invention called a water pump to make life easier for the school marm and her thirsty kids.

How did the pump work?

It is all a matter of air pressure. When you stick a pipe down the well into a pool of water at the bottom, air inside the pipe pushes down on the water in the pipe, and air outside the pipe is pushing down on the water in the well, which in turn pushes up. All is in balance.

But now let’s say little Johnny or Timmy, Susy or Jane begins to vigorously pump the handle sucking out the air inside the pipe. (At the soda fountain, Johnny and Susy creates the same reaction with their straws in a root beer float.) The water pressure in the well remains the same, but there is no counter acting force pushing the water down the pipe, so it begins to gush out the faucet.
Note, that the vacuum pump only works to a depth of 34 feet more or less, depending on altitude, since that is when the atmospheric pressure in the well reaches equilibrium with the vacuum in the pipe. Want the details?

Mount Tabor school, District no. 30, Butler County, KansasBut

Mount Tabor, south of Nazareth in Galilee, is believed to be the site of the Transfiguration of Jesus. It is also the 12th century B.C. site where an army of 10,000 Israelites under the command of Barak and the prophetess Deborah defeated the Canaanites.

In the 1870’s one room schools sprouted on the Kansas prairies like spring flowers. One of the early ones was District No. 30, later known as Mt. Tabor school.

Mount Tabor schoolhouse, Dist. No. 30, Butler County, Kansas

The name Mount Tabor appears as far back as 1944 in a survey of one room schools of Butler County. The story explaining why or how District No. 30 was renamed Tabor is lost. The one room school sits on a low rise overlooking the surrounding prairie. A New Testament scholar might make the association with the Transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor. An Old Testament scholar would like the idea of the Israelites fresh in the promised land, conquering the Philistines. Our 44th President, Barack Obama would appreciate the name of the conquering Israelite Judge, Barack, which in Hebrew means “black.”

1870, The Promised Land

Settlers rushed into the promised land of Butler County, Kansas like the Israelites. Names like Goodland, Richland, Pleasent Valley, and the like enticed them with visions of paradise. Homesteads of 160 acres at one dollar and twenty five cents, were available to all. The cost of the land was to go to the Osage Indians, who in 1870 were once and for all removed from Kansas to reservations in Oklahoma.

In July of 1870 Kansas Senator Sidney Clarke offer in Congress an Indian appropriation bill, allowing that the Osage Diminished Reserve be open to settlers at $1.25 per acre. Congress quickly ratified Clarke’s bill. The Osage Diminished Reserve was a 30 mile wide strip of land in Kansas, lying just north of the now familiar towns of  Wichita, Augusta, Andover, and Pittsburg. Settlers rushed into this land after passage of the act to quickly make claim to the 160 acres allowed under the act.

“Sooners” rushed in and even before the act became law, on June 13, 1870, a patent was issued to Parlina Kinder for the first claim in what would two years later become Rock Creek Township. Others followed in quick succession and with their families came the need for a school.

southern half of Butler County, Kansas with northern boundary of the Diminished Osage Indian Reserve drawn

William G. Cutler’s in his History of the State of Kansas, first published in 1883, includes among the early schools in Butler County, Kansas:

Rock Creek Township, 1870, by subscription of settlers in District No. 30

Another source lists the active dates of the school from 20 March 1871 until 11 April 1951. Butler Early Schools.

District School No. 30 in Rock Creek Township in Butler County sits on a dusty 230th street, 2 miles south of Douglass Kansas, and 4 miles to the east of paved Highway 77, halfway between Hopkins Switch and Purity Springs roads. It is a typical Kansas one room school, built of native Kansas limestone with two front doors, one for boys and the other for girls. Four windows along the east and west facing walls allow for light from the morning and afternoon sun. At a later time, plaster was put over the limestone and a new roof was added.

Side view of Mt. Tabor school

It pops up on the Rock Creek Township map of 1885, down at the bottom in section 30, just west of Swishers Branch and on property belonging to H.S. Johnson. The unpaved gravel road is 230th street.

Rock Creek Township

School teachers were often newly married housewives or bachelors. They earned $30 a month, give or take, and sometimes payment was in food, hence the idea of giving a teacher an apple a day. Teachers had to be nurse, peacemaker, referee, fire maker, cook, professor and poet. Equipped with little more than a blackboard and a few borrowed books, teachers taught the three R’s, penmanship, and right from wrong.