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Shelby County |
Home 1915 History Index |
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Shelby County |
Home 1915 History Index |
CHAPTER VIII - REMINISCENCES OF THE PIONEERS (CONT'D)
[Professor Warner, beginning with the fall of 1885, was for eleven years superintendent of the city schools of Harlan. During that time he achieved not only a county-wide reputation for his learning and skill as a teacher, but became known all over the West. During this time he served as president of the State Teachers’ Association of Iowa. Young men and women all over Shelby county, and in many parts of the West, are indebted very greatly to Professor Warner for the high distinction which many of them have achieved in life. No man in Shelby county, during his time, wielded a like influence over the schools, teachers and students of Shelby county.--EDITOR.]
Having visited Harlan in the summer of 1883, and taught in the Shelby county teachers’ institute for a month in 1884, I moved to Harlan and took charge as superintendent of city schools in the fall of 1885. For the most part, Shelby county was then a new region. Many recent immigrants from Germany and the Scandinavian countries had established themselves in various parts of the county, their settlements constituting colonies. New immigrants were coming each year. Land was still very cheap, much of it unimproved, and such improvements as were to be found were of the simplest sort. Outside of Harlan the towns in the county were small villages of primitive type. At Harlan an old wooden court house occupied the public square. There were no expensive residences or elegant churches or pretentious business establishments; there were no electric lights, water works, sewers or permanent sidewalks. The best building in town was the public school building, a nearly-new, nine-room, three story, brick building, flimsy of construction, with poorly arranged and badly lighted rooms. It was the pride of Harlan, wholly unpaid for, and the chief municipal enterprise yet undertaken by the citizens of the county seat. The people of the county were industrious, hospitable, religious and prosperous. It is probable that there was not a full dress suit in the county. There were very few college-trained men and women to be found. Most of the professional men in active practice had studied with some older man in an office and had been admitted to their several professions by the simplest and most direct processes. The State University made some requirements for admission to the college of liberal arts, but almost illiterate students were welcomed in the schools of law and medicine. There was not a well organized high school in the county and never had been. So far as I now recall, there were but two students from Shelby county in attendance upon any college. These two young men, Chatburn and Wicks, were at Ames. The Misses Wyland and Jack were attending a girls’ seminary in Minnesota. A few young people had done a little high school work at Harlan and at Shelby. Few of the teachers of the county had had any professional training save the little that could be obtained at the annual institutes. Most of them were from the rural schools. It was quite common for school boards to elect the members of their own families or other young people from the immediate neighborhood as teachers, without much regard to scholastic or other qualifications. Teachers were licensed by the county superintendent upon his own judgment. The annual institute was chiefly a school to coach applicants for teachers’ licenses, the examinations were formal and inadequate, and the certificates were given for three, six, or twelve months. Less than thirty years have passed since that time, yet one must remember that this is nearly a generation, measured in terms of human life. Shelby county was then just emerging from frontier conditions, conditions that had repeated themselves with slight variation in every neighborhood in the United States, in the slow march of civilization from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But western Iowa had the railroad and the telegraph and the daily paper to help and to hasten its development. An energetic people, living in a fertile region, with great markets not far away, accumulated wealth with great rapidity. Although the greedy railroads practiced unfair discriminations and often took too large a share of the total product in that early day, the people soon grew rich. In fact, wealth grew more rapidly than the ability to use it for the highest purposes. A single crop often brought more than the ground that produced it was worth. An immigrant could go in debt for the best farm in Shelby county in those days, starting empty handed, and get it paid for before the smell of the steerage had disappeared from his person. But little of the wealth they produced was turned back into the country. It was invested in more land, sometimes, and better buildings and equipments began to appear, and blooded stock became more common; but vast sums have gone from Shelby county to the far West, or North, or South for investment, in all these years. I like to let my imagination dwell upon western Iowa as it would have been today if all the wealth produced by her people during these three decades had gone into the country itself, into internal improvements, cities, homes, roads, schools, libraries, comforts, luxuries; and if her children, instead of scattering to the four quarters of the earth for adventure and opportunity, had stayed on the prairies of their native state. Would it not be a garden of Eden? Well, those were the visions that we had in those days. We thought more of posperity than of our ancestors. If the present is not quite so wonderful as we anticipated, it is because new forces, new factors, new temptations, new opportunities, have dissipated our energies and scattered the seed we sowed over a larger field than we dreamed of. So if one asks what the men of Shelby county accomplished in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, one must needs lift his eyes and look afar into many states and lands, and there read the story of splendid achievement. I wish that it were more condensed so that we might the better comprehend it, but it is more marvelous in its potential greatness as it is. And the greatest of the forces of those years were the spiritual forces working upon the minds and characters of youth, developing ideals, revealing realities, enlarging visions. This is what the simple schools and the crude teachers of that day were doing.
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