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At the dawn of the 20th century, children in Lewis County attended one of nearly 180 local one-room schools, but today it’s harder to find people who recall doing so.
Last month, I joined more than a dozen people seated at desks in the replica of a one-room school at Fort Borst Park in Centralia to hear 91-year-old Jean Bluhm share her experiences as the smartest first-grader at the one-room Alta School in Barnes County, North Dakota.
“I was the only one in first grade, and my mother was a teacher, and so my father said to me, ‘you were also the dumbest one, Jean,’” she recalled. “But he wasn’t at liberty to say that in our house; you didn’t use the word dumb or stupid.”
Her mother, Alice (Gray) Hilts, completed two years of college before teaching in Montana and North Dakota. Teachers then had to abide by strict rules. They couldn’t dye their hair, date, smoke cigarettes or dress in bright colors. They had to be home between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. unless attending a school function. They had to wear two petticoats, sweep the floor daily, mop once a week, and they could not marry.
“Since no one could be married and teach in town, this caused a little problem because my mother married my dad, and they eloped and didn’t tell anyone,” Jean said. “They taught a couple more years, but when I decided to come along, she had to move to a one-room school district.”
In 1935, when Jean was nearly two, her mother started work at Alta School, where she taught until 1938. The family lived on the school grounds in a tiny trailer without electricity, using Aladdin lamps for light and a kerosene stove for heat and cooking. A dirt road led to the one-acre grounds with a school building, an outhouse (one side for boys, the other for girls), and a swing set and merry-go-round.
The family used the school’s outhouse, although on cold, dark below-freezing nights, Jean said, she used a “thunder pot” or chamber pot to relieve herself.
When her mother made Jell-O, she set it into a creek to grow cold and set. During the summer, her mother hooked the trailer to the car and followed their father to his road-building jobs for the state.
Twice a day, trains ran past the snow fence, which kept the railroad tracks clear. Jean’s mother favored some of the hobos who rode the rails, giving them food in exchange of doing odd jobs.
During the summer, the wind blew dry dirt everywhere until her father eventually put gravel on the road. Older boys usually worked on their family farms during the fall.
Students played games such as baseball, dodge ball, Ante Over and Pom-Pom-Pull-Away.
“Girls always wore dresses in the winter, and I had long cotton stockings that I held up with a garter and two little things in the front and in the back,” she recalled. “Sometimes they’d start slipping down, and you give a grab at them and pull them up.”
When North Dakota Health Department officials stopped at the school to administer smallpox shots, Jean’s mother asked her to line up for the first shot.
“I never even got one of those really nice little scars from the smallpox shot because my mom said she thought I had it when I was a baby,” she said.
Life in the trailer wasn’t easy.
“We pulled the water from the well and brought it over, and each night, we took what my dad called a spit bath.” She said they dabbed themselves clean with a rag and water. “Now Mel (her husband) said he had to take the same kind of bath, and he called it a sponge bath, and that sounds a whole lot better.”
Once a week she washed her hair with bar soap, and her mother rinsed it by pouring heated water over her head. Her dad braided her hair, which he’d learned to do with horses, and it lasted all week.
Her mother taught students in all grade levels, so it didn’t matter if older students learned along with younger ones. When anyone fell behind, she often sent them to the trailer for “special ed” or tutoring in reading or math by her father if he wasn’t building roads in the winter.
“Sometimes he would cook with them to teach fractions,” she said.
In addition to teaching, her mother served as principal and janitor. She started a fire each morning in the stove at the center of the room, where she occasionally heated soup sent by parents in a big pot to share with all the students. She also directed a drama production each year.
“There was only one telephone in this whole area, and we got all the calls,” Jean said.
One time she helped her mother catch a skunk that had taken shelter beneath the school from the below-20-degree weather. Her mother set a trap and asked her snow-suited daughter to walk away slowly, pulling a rope, so she could shoot the skunk with a .22.
“We put it in a gunny sack,” Jean said. “I wanted it to be beside my favorite dog, who had died in the spring, but we couldn’t dig a hole. We had to wait till spring to put the little skunk to rest.”
During the winter, after wind blew piles of snow behind the fence, older boys built tunnels where children could stand up to play while avoiding severe winter winds.
“As spring came along, Mom would say, ‘No more tunnel play.’ It would melt.” Jean said spring brought the sprouting of winter crops. “Everyone prayed: don’t hail, and please no tornado, and let’s have enough rain so that the crops would succeed and they would be able to make it another year.”
During one tornado, she huddled on her bed beneath her blankets while adults rushed outside to gather their turkeys. She said the tornado “broke the window right by my bed, and it just drove the glass into the floor and into the wall beside me.”
Once, while staying with her grandparents during a winter storm, her father plowed roads while her mother trudged four miles along the railroad track to open the school.
“All those kids were coming to school, and she wanted to be there and start that fire for them,” said Jean, who noted her mother had black on her legs from frostbite.
In 1939, Jean started second grade at Gretchel Prairie School, about 20 miles away, where her mother taught, but it proved challenging with unruly students and parents they didn’t know. They lived near an old, abandoned church, where Jean often played.
“I always wanted to be a teacher, so I’d line up everybody, and I would be sure that they learned what they were supposed to learn,” she said.
The family expanded to include her sister, Shirley, and they moved into Valley City to a two-room house with an icebox beneath the floor for cold storage. She attended a larger school that even had a library, and she loved to read.
During World War II, when five of her mother’s seven brothers were fighting, the Hilts family followed her grandparents to California. They later moved to Woodland, Wash., before settling at Napavine, where Jean graduated in 1951. She completed two years at Centralia College and earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education from Western Washington State College in Bellingham.
She married Mel Bluhm in 1953, and they raised their three children in Chehalis. Jean taught 10 years in Chehalis grade schools, two decades at Centralia High School, and a few years in Rochester.
Her entire family, following her mother’s example, became teachers. Alice Hilts retired after teaching more than 43 years. Bluhm’s sister Shirley Valeos taught 35 years in Vancouver. All three of Bluhm’s children — Sheri Davis, Jerry Bluhm and Deb Parnham — majored in education. Sheri taught in Mossyrock, Jerry in Seattle, and Deb for 37 years in Centralia. She also serves on the school board. Jean’s granddaughter Tara Rogerson teaches in Centralia.
“So we’re kind of an education family,” Jean said.
After retiring in 1985, Jean pursued her passion for Mary Adeline (Roundtree) Borst, dressing as the wife of pioneer Joseph Borst, portraying her in presentations, and helping to convert the historic white house he built for his bride into a museum. She has written nearly a half dozen books about the Borst family and construction of both the schoolhouse and the pioneer church.
“You can see, I’m a Borst fan.”
She worked with the Lewis County Retired Teachers and Centralia Parks & Recreation Department to raise donations of $23,000 and collect materials to construct a replica of a one-room pioneer school next to the Borst House. Students in Mitch Smith’s Centralia High School shop class built the school in 1995. They received donations of bells, blackboards, and materials, and Jean’s husband built a fort and a glass case. The school was dedicated on Sept. 16, 1996, and teachers invited Smith and his students to return for a commemoration two decades later.
“Some of the boys said this was the most exciting thing they did all through their whole high school time,” Jean said. “So that was kind of good. And parents came, too, and said they were proud of what their kids had done.”
She asked retired teachers to each select a historic one-room school in Lewis County to feature in a quilt draped at the front of the room in the schoolhouse.
“They were about eight miles apart so that a child could walk to school or ride his horse,” she said. “The one in the middle is the Evaline School, which is still being used.”
The 1890 one-room Evaline School was dismantled in 1908 and replaced with the two-room building in use today, according to the school’s website.
In early 2017, Jean launched an effort to raise $29,000 and gathered material donations to construct a pioneer church near the school. She helped lay the foundation with her husband and four other octogenarians. The church was dedicated in 2021.
At 2 p.m. Aug. 8, Jean will share the story of Mary Borst and construction of the historic Borst House in the early 1860s and how it became a museum.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
