In an article published in the Montana Farmer-Stockman (March 1, 1931, p. 5) titled “Educating the Farmers’ Children” Fred Ward, Superintendent of Thompson Falls High School writes:
The greatest single fact about Montana geography is distance. Someone has said that our state in handicapped by having too much room. Even with roads being improved day by day, with transportation becoming more reliable and more convenient, we still are confronted with the primary facts of Montana’s magnificent distances.
This same element of distance confronts us whether we are trying to raise wheat for the world’s market or trying to educate our children. Hard as it is to educate the smaller children, the problem grows more difficult after the boy or girl has graduated from the elementary school and is ready for high school.
As school superintendent Ward goes on to suggest the distance problem could be overcome by building dormitories for students at the high schools. He was speaking from experience as a rural school teacher, principal, and superintendent. His school, the Thompson Falls High School, had the largest high school dormitory in the state.
Figure 1. The dormitory at Thompson Falls High School. From the Public School Dormitories for Rural Children in Montana.
Edith Lathrop, the specialist in rural education for the United States Bureau of Education, spent two weeks in Montana in 1920 to learn more about schools with dormitories. Lathrop (1922) found that the percentage of high school students living in school dormitories in Montana ranged from ten percent to ninety-four percent, with a median of forty-one percent. She found that 25 Montana high schools had dormitories. Lathrop wrote (1922a, p. 233):
This indicates that the dormitories were serving a real need. The opinion was expressed generally, in the schools visited in sparsely settled regions, that dormitories had very materially increased the rural attendance.
Figure 2. The Box Elder Valley Press, November 19, 1920
Miss Lathrop reported her findings in a government bulletin and in the leading education journals of the day. In the 1922 government publication Dormitories in Connection with Public Secondary Schools Lathrop wrote (1922b, p. 9):
Within the past few years there has been a tendency to establish dormitories in connection with county and district high schools in sparsely settled regions or in localities where transportation is difficult. It has seemed to be the best way to provide high-school education for those who live at distances too great for transportation. The greatest impetus given to this movement has been in the State of Montana, where there are now 25 county and district high schools maintaining dormitories. According to the report of the State superintendent for 1920, the practicability of dormitories for housing public school children who live far from school was first demonstrated in 1914-15, at the Flathead County High School in Kalispell. A commodious residence was leased by the county school board and transformed into a dormitory for girls. The experiment proved so satisfactory that in 1915-16 a building which formerly been used for a business college was remodeled for a boys’ dormitory.
Figure 3 Department of The Interior Bulletin, 1922.
Richardson and Barger in their 1927 publication Public School Dormitories for Rural Children in Montana list four reasons for establishing dormitories in Montana:
- Large, sparsely settled districts
- Consolidation impracticable
- Cost of additional district high schools prohibitive
- Living quarters in town hard to find
The towns in Montana with school dormitories included Big Sandy, Boulder, Broadview, Browning, Choteau, Cohagen, Columbus, Deer Lodge, Dillon, Ekalaka, Fort Benton, Geraldine, Glasgow, Jordan, Kalispell, Lewistown, Manhattan, Nashua, Sumatra, Thompson Falls, Whitehall, and Winnett (Richarson and Barger, 1927).
Agricultural Education in Schools with Dormitories
The study of agriculture was a drawing card for rural students at schools with dormitories. Many of the male students lived on ranches or farms and the parents wanted them to learn more about modern agriculture. However the distance and transportation considerations were a barrier in traveling to a school where agriculture was taught. Schools with dormitories were the solution. Female students were also attracted to schools with dormitories so they could study home economics.
Figure 4. An illustration from the Interior Department bulletin Dormitories in Connection with Public Secondary Schools. It is too bad the school was not identified. It was probably the Powell County High School at Deer Lodge.
There was a symbiotic relationship between the dormitory and the agriculture program at the Powell County High School in Deer Lodge. The agriculture students raised forage for three cows and took care of a flock of chickens that supplied eggs for meals in the dorms. They also had plans to raise a pig for food (see Figure 5). In exchange for their labor, the cost of living in the dormitory was waived. The dormitory supervisor of the boys was Ray Carmon, the agriculture teacher. It was interesting to note that Mrs. Carmon, Ray’s mother, was the matron in the girls’ dormitory.
Figure 5. The Box Elder Valley Press, November 19, 1920
In a newspaper article advocating for the passage of a bond issue to build a dormitory in Lewistown in 1914 one of the points made was that the planned addition of agriculture classes at the high school would necessitate the need for the dormitory (see Figure 6).
Figure 6. From the Daily Democrat, Lewistown, MT. October 28, 1914
The 1914 bond issue did not pass. A perusal of newspapers at the time found that the citizens of Lewistown were against raising taxes to support the education of non-residents.
A non-resident was a person who lived outside the immediate school district. It should be noted that Fergus county, where Lewistown is located, occupies about as much land as Connecticut and Rhode island combined. In addition to the county high school, there were 13 district high schools. However there were 100 school districts in the county with no high schools.
Principal Cummings of the Fergus County High School and Secretary Blodgett of the Lewistown Chamber of Commerce presented the matter to the businessmen of Lewistown after the bond issue failed. The businessmen of Lewistown felt that they should do their part towards making it possible for the country boys and girls as well as city children to secure a high school education and organized the Commercial Club. A handsome dormitory of brick and stucco was subsequently funded and erected and then rented to the school board.
The basement held a dining room that accommodated over 100 persons at a time, a laundry, kitchen, trunk storage room, furnace room and four small storage rooms. The first floor contained the boys’ rooms and also the matron’s quarters and a recreation parlor. The girls’ rooms on the second floor had a private sitting room of its own. The boys made a large davenport, study tables, dining room tables, laundry tubs, iron boards, a kitchen cupboard and installed an electric bell system for the dormitory in their manual training class. The building opened for the students on February 1, 1917 and all the rooms were immediately filled.
Figure 7. The Fergus County High School dormitory as it looks today. It is a hotel now.
Even though the 1914 bond issue failed, agriculture was added to the school curriculum and was one of the first schools in the state to receive funding under the Smith-Hughes Act.
Not all dormitories were as fancy as Thompson Falls and Fergus County. The image below is of the Big Sandy dormitories.
Figure 8. The boys’ and girls’ dormitories at Big Sandy in 1922. Images from the school yearbook.
During the great depression bank failures in Montana caused some of the dormitories to cease operation and they were sold. And some families could no longer afford the cost of living in the dormitory. Writing in Pages of Time: A History of Petroleum County, Montana Harry Knapp recounted this story (1989, p. 177):
My sister Vera started to high school in Winnett the year before I did . She lived in the school dormitory. One day in January 1930, Dad went to town to do shopping and when he came home he brought Vera and all her luggage with him. In town he had learned that the bank had closed so there was no money to pay her dormitory rent.
After the depression eased, schools in Montana returned to building dormitories.
Concluding Remarks
In Montana the school dormitories and agricultural education were like peanut butter and jelly – they went well together. However, Montana was not the only state with dormitories at high schools. There were some high schools in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Wisconsin, North Carolina. California, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Tennessee, Utah Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming with high school dormitories.
It is somewhat ironic that The Vocational Education Amendments of 1968 (Public Law 90-576) authorized federal grants for the construction, operation, and maintenance of residential schools and dormitories to facilitate vocational training. Montana had figured this out some 50 years ago.
Lathrop concluded her article in The Journal of General Education by writing (1922a, p. 234)
Is there a demand for high school dormitories? This investigation warrants the assertion that with the agricultural high schools where farms are operated in connection with the schools dormitories are a necessity. The care of crops, live stock and the details of household management demand that students reside on the farm. Again, if high school advantages are to be provided for students in localities where transportation is impossible because of long distance and where geographical conditions will not permit consolidation, dormitories are again a necessity.
If you would like to learn more about this topic and see photos of some of the Montana dormitories I would encourage you to click on the links below in the references.
References
Lathrop, Edith (1921, April). Dormitories in Connection with Public Secondary Schools. The School Review. Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 306-309.
Lathrop, Edith (1922a, September 14). Dormitories as a High School Venture. The Journal of General Education. Vol 96. No.9, pp. 23-234.
Lathrop, Edith (1922b). Dormitories in Connection with Public Secondary Schools . Bulletin. 1922, No. 12. Department of the Interior. United States Government.
Richardson, Jessie & Barger, J. Wheeler (1827). Public School Dormitories for Rural Children in Montana. University of Montana, Agricultural Experiment Station.