District #23 ~ Wellfleet

Lincoln County Nebraska

In 1950 only 27,000 people lived in all of Lincoln County and 25,000 of them lived in North Platte* Most of the county was grassland, with very small communities scattered around the countryside, consequently schools were also very small.

Besides District #23, which was the largest, there were a half dozen one room school houses around the area: Echo, Somerset, Dickens and Wallace, each with a handful of students. One school, Community Center, had only one!

Our schoolhouse was a large two story frame building with two rooms on the main floor and had once housed the high school upstairs, so we were not exactly a one-room school house but had the teaching structure of one with multiple grades in one room. Each room had one teacher. Pictures below taken in 1955. I was in 4th grade, seated in the first row, last seat.

Beginners thru 4th Grades ~ 23 Students

5th thru 8th Grades ~ 12 Students

There was all kinds of interesting stuff up on the second floor, it was rather like an attic, full of old books, water coolers, easels and broken desks. Once I remember spotting an apparatus where the sun, the moon and the earth would rotated around each other when you turned a little handle.  In 4th grade I was totally unfamiliar with the how the solar system revolved. I don't know why the instrument was stored upstairs and not actually used as a learning device. 

When we first moved to the farm, I was in the 3rd grade, so in the Lower Room. Our teach was Cora Jane Hanson, who was very young, very pretty and didn't seem old enough to be a teacher. We didn't call her Miss Hanson, we called her Cora Jane.

There are two things I remember in particular about third grade in the new country school. One, on the first day of school I brought a big Whitman Sampler candy box full of broken crayons that I had accumulated from kids at Washington School in North Platte. I don't know why I collected other kids broken colors, but I did and it was a pretty big deal that I had so many when most kids had a little box of 16. Two, a favorite punishment of hers, was to make us stand with our nose in a circle drawn on the chalkboard if we had done something like talking when we were supposed to be quiet. It was rather humiliating to say the least. I remember wetting my pants when that happened to me, only once I think, but I was up there more than that. I never was very good at being quiet in class and continued to get moved to another seat all the way through high school.

Outhouse in background

Our classrooms were heated with a space heater along the edge of the room, probably kerosene.  There was a wash stand, a water cooler, and there must have been a small water pump right by the wash basin or somewhere in the room because I don't remember ever carrying water, which we would have done if that had been the case, as we did take out the trash, dust erasers and sprinkle that sawdust cleaning product on the floor. I believe there was a janitor who swept it up in the mornings.

Which brings me to the outhouse! The only bathroom was outside, just like the one at our new house on the farm, only this time there were two, one for boys and one for girls.  I wonder if it was a one or two holer? All I do know for sure is that it was pretty smelly and we used it!  Actually several of my friends also had just an outhouse at their homes. I went to this little school through 8th grade, although a new brick building had been built, with real bathrooms!

Lincoln County~Wellfleet is 28 miles South of North Platte

*Population of Lincoln County: 27,380 (1950)-28,490 (1960)

Population of Cities:

• North Platte 25,433 (1950)-17,184 (1960)
• Wallace 361 (1950)-293 (1960)
• Wellfleet 98 (1950)-67 (1960)
• Dickens 60 (1950)-25 (1960)

First Drafted Summer 2010. First Revision May 2020.