The prairie schoolhouse

The prairie schoolhouse was a product of the Western Homestead Era, those years beginning in the late nineteenth century when the federally owned short grass prairies and sagebrush country were opened to farming. In beautiful, straightforward photographs, John Martin Campbell has documented what remains of the schoolhouses of that era. Once there were thousands across the prairies; now few remain, and most of them are in advanced states of disrepair. As the author notes in his informative text, the farmers who came to stake a claim on the prairies - regardless of where they came from or how much they knew about farming - all wanted their children to be educated. In regions of abundant homesteads, one-room schools were built every two to four miles, usually by the farmers themselves. They generally hired one teacher to teach grades one through eight. The drying out of the prairies, culminating in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, drove farmers from the land and ended the Homestead Era. The prairie schoolhouses were abandoned. This affectionate but unsentimental look at a singularly American institution preserves it just in time, before it vanishes forever.