Avoid topics of religion and politics when in polite company.
To this admonition I would add topics of education — especially when in the company of parents, teachers or school officials. Americans are very opinionated about what constitutes “best-practice” in educating the next generation. A series of petitions, written by heads of families to the Lake County Superintendent of Common Schools in 1871, were recently donated to the Historic Courthouse Museum. These letters have reminded me that, like so many current debates in our culture, those relating to education have a long history.
It’s comforting to know that we’ve always been a little crazy where our children are concerned.
When the first wagon trains of American settlers made their way down the grade from Napa into the Clear Lake Basin in the early 1850s, public education was not an established concept. In fact, it was a topic that journalists, congressmen and preachers were hotly debating across the country. The new state of California was no different.
By public education, I mean free education. At the time, parents had to pay private tutors to teach their children one-on-one or pay a subscription fee for their children to attend a private school. For the vast majority of parents, though, such costs were prohibitive and rather than the schoolroom, they sent their children to the fields and shops to begin earning for the family.
The first decade of public school legislation in California established the framework that would eventually allow for incorporated cities and counties to build and fund public schools. But legislation takes time, and for most of the 1850s the paltry tax counties were able to levy for public schools barely covered the cost of construction. Towards the end of the 1850s, there were only two schools serving the families who had settled in the Clear Lake Basin, still just a township of Napa County.
I’m using the term “school” loosely.
Sussanah Roberts Townsend immigrated to Big Valley in the late 1850s and is one of the earliest known teachers in the area. In an 1859 letter to her sister back east, Mrs. Townsend provides us insight into the quality of these early schools. She relates that the family on whose property she lived “made it a condition … that either I or Emory [her husband] teach her children.” Mrs. Townsend agreed to do so and used the granary in which she and her small family lived as a makeshift classroom. Word quickly got around and other nearby families sent their children — weather permitting — so that Mrs. Townsend soon had nine students on her hands. Thus was born a school of sorts. As was customary in such rural areas of that time, Mrs. Townsend took her payment in potatoes or “a sack of cabbage or beets or some eggs.” In the end, she only worked three months as a teacher — the school a short-lived affair. During those three months she earned $60, only one of which was cash, the rest being goods in-kind.
Things started to pick up steam in the 1860s for public education. Passionate individuals wrote and lobbied for the passing of laws that created a state school tax and required counties to levy even more taxes for public education. With this patchwork of monies, by 1865 all counties in California were required to maintain free public schools for at least five months out of the year.
This law proved to be an ideal, rather than a reality for several years to come. But it was a start, and one that allowed for an unprecedented number of schools to sprout up across California. In Lake County — made a separate county in 1861 — the number of public schools jumped from just four in the beginning of the 1860s to 14 by the end of the decade. For something that had been so hotly debated just a decade earlier, public schools in even rural counties like ours certainly found fertile ground.
It was at the height of public school construction in Lake County that the Historic Courthouse Museum’s most recent acquisitions were written. These petitions, written and signed by heads of families, were sent to the County Superintendent of Common Schools, Mack Matthews and the Board of Supervisors.
With public education as new as it was, the parents who signed these petitions were probably on the whole only minimally educated. Despite this — or maybe because of this — they seem adamant that their children have access to public schools. In each petition, the heads of families request their very own school district to be created. These letters follow a general format, with the parents particularly detailed in explaining the distances their children have to travel now and how much easier it would be if school were closer. They also mention how many children live in the area that the new proposed district would serve.
In the petition for the division of the Loconomi School District, the heads of families explain that “our school district is so large that we cannot have a school house in any part that will be accessible to all, and as there are children enough to form two good schools we therefore desire to have the district divided …” That last point was particularly important to note because the law stated that in order for a school district to be created, there needed to be at least 10 school-aged children living in the area.
Between 1869 and 1871, eight new school districts were created in Lake County. As Superintendent during these years, Mack Matthews’ task was to verify the validity of the petitions, which meant in some cases travelling to the districts in question to confirm the number of school-age children — the last thing the county wanted to do was fund a school for only four students, after all. His recommendation to the Board of Supervisors would make or break parents’ chances of getting schools built closer to home.
On the whole, Matthews approved the petitions sent his way in 1871. The petition for dividing the Cinnabar School District in southeastern Lake County, however, proved less straight forward. Sparking letters of dissent and approval from rival factions of family heads, this unique conflict provides a glimpse into the currents of politics and power that underlay public education in early Lake County….. to be continued.
Tony Pierucci is Curator of Lake County Museums
