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Faye Bertholf McCoy: CHILDHOOD IN SOUTH-CENTRAL KANSAS IN THE 1920s. Community Life Farm families were a unit to themselves, and with everyone taking part, they were a source of stability, comfort, and support. The community was usually centered by a small town, which furnished the support structure for the farms. There one would find the railroad depot, several merchants, a lumber-yard, the bank, the doctor’s office -sometimes in the back of the drug store, the Post Office, the blacksmith shop -which might have a gasoline or ‘coal-oil’ pump, the school, and the church or churches. Sometimes there would be a Lodge Hall, a Community Building, a hotel, perhaps a telephone office, a light plant—and even a city jail in the "city building"! There was no sanitation system nor water system, but there were a few sidewalks and a cluster of pleasant homes, usually with a garden, a stable for the horse and cow, a chicken house and even sometimes, a garage for the car. Community life centered around church and school. I believe there was a school for the 8 grades in each township. This was planned so that children had easy access to their school without hardship in transportation. Children usually walked or rode a horse. Many rural schools had barns for the horses. The school in ‘my’ little neighborhood was a combination grade and high school, District #88 Grade, District #2 High School. The High School district was larger than the Grade School district. When I started to school in 1919, there was a small white frame building across town from the larger school that took care of the first 3 grades. The larger 2-story building housed the remaining grades and the high school. It had no gymnasium, no bathrooms, no running water. There was an outdoor basket-ball court, and there was a court in a community building on Main street, where competitive games were played with other schools by the high school teams-both boys and girls.
The school I attended as a girl (left); my fourth grade reader (right)
Copyright
© 1997 Faye Bertholf McCoy. "I,
Witness to History" and logo are trademarks of Wesley
Retirement Communities, Inc., d/b/a Larksfield Place. All rights reserved.
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