Sack Races Thursday April 15, 2021

 Palmville District 44 West

Roy Shoquist and Helmfred Johnson May 7, 1926

     The one-room school house located at the intersection of Roseau County roads 8 and 125, serves as a landmark for the people of Roseau County thanks to the Palmville Township Board of the late Layton Oslund, and the late Kenneth Eggen; and Dale Billberg, Edward Dunham, and Joe McDonnell who voted to reside the structure and re-roof it with steel to continue its use for township meetings and general elections. Its preservation also serves as a landmark of memories for those people who once attended school there and their families. They can revisit the site where they received their education and without too much provocation vividly recall those early childhood years.
     In July and December of 1901, at the homes of John Bengston and Louis Palm, School District 44 was organized. As the numbers of school age children began to increase it was decided to organize a formal school district and have seven months of school. The first order of business was to choose a site for the school building somewhere in the township.
     Records indicate the first proposal was to locate it in the center of the district, but it lost the vote. Another motion was the site between Sections 2 and 11 (Its present site). This site carried the majority but still provoked much debate among constituents. The decided site remained a matter of some discussion until 1903 when it was motioned and seconded to have two schools, one known as 44 West and one as 44 East. The West school was to be built as near the Section Stick of Sections 2, 3, 11, and 10 as practical; and the East to the Quarter Stick between the Sections of 7, 12, 13, and 18. (Sections 7 and 18 are in Golden Valley Township.)
     The East school, was also known as the Torfin School for the Torfin Post Office near there. It was attended by Palmville and Golden Valley families living near the school and east of Mikinaak Creek along the South Fork of the Roseau River.
The West school was called District 44 West and attended by families in Palmville and Grimstad living west of the river and Mikinaak Creek. In the early days it was also known as the Dahl School, and in later years, the Billberg School.
     The building was decided to be built of logs and measure 18 by 24 feet. In 1904-05, records indicate the log buildings were in need of repair; carpenters were hired and materials purchased. Although records don’t indicate specifically that whole new buildings were built, it is thought they were, as District 44 West is a stud frame building.
     The schools each held classes half the term until about 1905 when records indicate two four-month terms; the fall term beginning in September, and the winter term in January. Both schools had classes during that same time.
     Distances and limited transportation played a role in where the children went to school than did the boundary of the school districts. The David Palm family of Grimstad Township lived two miles north of the Palmville Township line, yet attended 44 West because it was closer than the nearest Grimstad District school five miles north.
Families living southwest of the schoolhouse two or three miles and east of the swamp, like the Andrew Palms and William Jesmes went to District 44 West.
     However, a third school was organized in 1926 by August Torkelson of Section 34 so his children wouldn’t have so far to go to school. U12W was located five miles due south of 44 West on the Roseau County/Marshall County line in Palmville. It operated only for one year with one teacher, Emrose Dallum and one student Robert Torkelson; Robert and his brother Marshall, later boarded with another family nearer 44 West.
     Because its school was located next door to the T.V. Hovorka homestead in Section 6 Palmville, it would be no far guess to suggest Johnny Hovorka (1911-1988) ... attended Sunshine District 87 school in Poplar Grove in Section 1 of that township, a high sand ridge above the swamp west of District 44 West. It was probably for the best, for 44 West had its share of characters as it was and a kid like Johnny Hovorka would’ve probably altered its trajectory as a great little place to have gone to school.
     “Why did 44 West standout as a special place?” was asked some of its former students. One former Grimstad Township man who resided in Roseau, declined to be quoted, but declared that District 44 West just got the most respectable students, thereby suggesting 44 East did not. 

For many, it seems, rural school was a unique personal adventure.   One former student said District 44 West was known as a tough school (for teachers, at least). The students enjoyed classes, even if their textbooks occasionally fell out of the open window from the window sill beside their desks ‘accidentally’ and they were forced to exit the school in the same way to fetch the books back in -- then somehow forgot what they were out there for and lingered there to the frustration of the teacher and the enjoyment of the other classmates.
     At District 44 West, students could go swimming in Mikinaak Creek in the spring and ice skating during the winter. So strong was the urge to play along the flowing creek, almost a quarter mile east of the school, that a few 1920s era students, including the late Raymond Palm and the late Helmfred Johnson actually broke ice on the creek in the spring to swim there. Paul Billberg, also in a 1920s era class, reputedly waved back at the teacher from the high creek bank as she tried to wave him and his fellow classmates back to class from the long distance. 

     Clarice Boyum received her rural school teacher’s degree from Morris, Minnesota in 1934 and soon after boarded with Olaf and Edith Billberg, as many Palmville teachers did, to begin her new teaching position in 1936. Clarice was paid fifty-five dollars a month. 

    “I had so much fun with them,” Clarice said. “Grandpa Billberg would drive me to school in a horse-drawn heated caboose in the winter. Parents were cooperative and children were anxious to learn. I only had good kids.”

   Palmville families showed their appreciation for their new teacher by putting on a welcome luncheon for Clarice complete with gifts, even though it was in the days when no one had any money. Johnny Hovorka wrote about her walking to school once, referring to Clarice as, “ . . . the teacher with the green snowsuit.” 

 In her first year she endured six weeks of minus 30 weather. Not being accustomed to starting her own fires, Clarice paid one of the students in the eighth grade, Leonard Johnson, ten cents a day, to start a fire in the woodstove of the one-room schoolhouse.
There were many fun outside activities that made recess and the noon hours something the children greatly anticipated. There was a creek near 44 west which made sliding and skating possible. In the spring and fall well water was used to drown gophers, and make mud pies.
     “I was not acquainted with a rural school. I went to school in Greenbush where there was either one grade in the room or two. Out here there were 25 kids in all eight grades! I enjoyed it once I got going.
    “The first student to arrive at the start of her new career was Iver Jesme. He was dark and cute as the dickens. I asked him if he was the only child in his family and he told me, “No, I ran away from Delores, my sister. She’s coming later.” Soon after Fern Palm (Severson) greeted Clarice with a bouquet of flowers.

The David Palm family: Ruth, Gladys, Elaine, Verna, Marvin and Bert of Grimstad all attended 44 West. They walked or rode the two miles south to school in a horse-drawn wagon spring and fall; and in the winter rode in a caboose pulled by their white horse Tony, who was kept in a little barn in the woods west of the schoolhouse. At the end of her day, Tony gave Clarice a ride home..
     A caboose, looked more like a ice fishing house mounted on heavy bobsled runners and was pulled by one or two horses. It had walls and a roof and a door. Inside there were two were two or three bench seats and sometimes a small cast iron woodstove to provide heat. The driver sat inside too, behind a window-pane windshield. The reins from the horse were passed through small holes into the caboose so the driver could hold them in the warmth and splendor of the caboose.
     Even with the woodstove in the caboose; its stovepipe protruding through the top of the roof and the smoke trailing behind, people still had to dress warmly and cover themselves with heavy blankets to keep warm on very cold days. There was no ‘climate control’ comfort in that era, just good old body-heat and popple coals.
    The roads that did exist weren’t plowed to any great degree except by the passage of local traffic and most of it all horse-drawn conveyances because automobiles were parked for the winter due to the lack of the invention of antifreeze. Their radiators had to be drained of water after each time they were used or the engines would freeze and break.
     So even though horses required care, feed and shelter they were still far more reliable than cars in those days, and because of the no-road conditions, horse drawn tobaggans or sleighs were virtually the only way to travel during the winter for many years in this  part of the country.
     Bert Palm recalled a time when they were taking the school teacher home in the caboose one particularly windy afternoon after school; the snow had blown and drifted much of the day. Marvin, Bert’s brother, was driving; Bert and sisters and the school teacher were inside when the caboose suddenly ran up onto a hard snowdrift on just the one side and the wind caught it and tipped the whole caboose over on its side -- right on the door.
     Imagine the horse suddenly caught in stride, stopped in its tracks by the dead weight of the tipped over caboose; the reins and straps from its harness twisted. Picture the horse trying to turn its head to look back around is blinders, its mouth open against the bit, its hot breath vaporizing in the cold wind. The caboose on its side behind its legs, the sled runners in the are. The black soot from the stove pipe salted plainly against the white of the snow; voices of muffled surprise and the sounds of movement inside it.
   Everyone wanting to get away from the hot woodstove, but no one panicking; everyone trying to get out ‘somehow’
Bert said he and Marvin got out and tipped the caboose back over on its runners. No one inside was worse for the experience and amazingly no one was burned against the woodstove or scattered coals. People had to be tough in those days, especially at 44 West.
     The school got a sanitary water fountain at some point in time. It stood in the NW corner of the front porch, just outside the classroom.
Some educated person had decided the ladle method of drinking water was the least sanitary method in our country’s schools and had invented a gravity-fed water fountain manufactured by the Waterbury Fountain Company: The Largest Makers of Sanitary Appliances For Schools, Minneapolis, Minnesota, for example.
     Having ruled out the use of individual drinking cups because sharing a cup too was something totally unacceptable in that forward thinking modern age, the water fountain became an instant sensation at District 44 West, as an example of modern genius. But apparently those geniuses didn’t consider what condition the water would be in before it got to the fountain or what bacteria may be floating around in it before anyone took their first drink of the day.
Funny what falls into those things when the lid is left off of them. 

    Let’s trace ‘the pipes’ leading from the well to the fountain. Well water is pumped from the well outside the schoolhouse, by hand. The water went into a bucket that hung from the spigot. Then the bucket was carried into the school to be poured into the tank of the fountain. No chance of error there -- unless the bucket took a recess of its own somewhere along the way between the well and the fountain, overnight, or over the weekend. I recall someone saying they could remember throwing out more than one bucket of water that had a dead mouse or two in it, then simply pumping more water in that same bucket and pouring it into the fountain.
     Or, they remembered vividly the times after filling the fountain, when the flow of water was strangely slow at the jet. After some preliminary backtracking, it wasn’t uncommon to discover that a mouse -- or something, was the culprit and was simply pulled speedily from the bottleneck to revolve the issue. One time a students stocking cap was rescued from the brew. In a few short minutes, the fountain worked like new!
     Students at 44 West didn’t have playground equipment, never did. The school was surrounded by woods until the 1930s; one old photograph indicated a field east of the schoolhouse behind cars parked there for a school party, or perhaps the last day of school. There were no swings or slides or jungle gyms. No computers or TVs. There was but one very important element those students had in their favor, that many of us, young and old alike seem to have let fall from our grasp as the times of our lives went on: our imaginations.
     Back in the days of 44 West, imagination made the students recesses “the great escape” and despite the fact they had nothing provided them except a bat and ball perhaps, Mikinaak Creek, the woods around the school, and the nearby field offered tons of opportunities for great fun. They invented games; they made tipis in the woods; they went exploring. They played along the creek; they drowned gophers out of their holes, and caught frogs in the grass. Some of the boys dissected some unfortunate critters; the possibilities were endless.
     Eight grades in one room, one teacher, sixteen to twenty-five kids. Bathrooms were outdoors. Woodstove heat was where the kids near the stove roasted and the kids near the door froze, likewise their lunches. The class faced the door, where the teacher sat at her desk in a corner of the room. Many of the students had similar memories of their rural school days, but a few  shared more personal glimpses of hat they remembered about 44 West:
 

Cameron Carlson: 

    “I first went to 44 West on early April of 1936 and finished second grade there. Clarice Billberg was my teacher. Then I started third grade that fall and continued through October. That is not a very long time, however it seemed very long, as many things happened that summer. Time passes slowly when one is young, then flies by when we are older; it would be better the other way around. My sister, Hazel, was four grades older than me. My sister, Eileen, was two years younger and started school there in the fall of 1936.
     “Beside my cousins, Owen, Verna, Gordon, Clifford, and Marie Carlson, I remember the Palm boys, and Fern Palm. She was cute though I didn’t appreciate it much then. There was the Jesme family that lived to the south and the Johnsons kids who lived west of the school.
     “At times Mother drove our Model T Ford back and forth from where we were living to where we were building our new place. While driving, she didn’t slow down much. She would maintain a good grip on the steering wheel and move along at much the same pace through straightaways, corners, and all.
     “In the fall of 1936, she drove quite often. At school it was the high point of the day someone would yell, “Here comes Mrs. Carlson again!” and we’d all run to watch her take that corner. She didn’t have any mishaps while driving  but later broke her arm while cranking that car.”
 

Delores (Jesme) Palm:
    “I remember the good teachers I had Alma (Kjersten) Ose 1932-34; Rose (Evans) Halverson, and Mable Hedin 1934-35; Clarice (Boyum) Billberg 1938-39; Anna (Njaa) Melby 1938-39 and Beatrice Larson Boyum 1939-1940. They really had a hard job. The wood was frozen and icy. The wash basin would freeze. With help of the big boys they had to keep the big old woodstove in the back of the room full of wood. Every year someone would throw a handful of twenty-two shells in the stove. No one confessed.
 

Clarice (Medicraft) Lancaster:
    "I attended District 44 West, beginning in the fall of 1938, until Christmas 1945. It was very scary for me. I was very shy and our family always spoke Swedish at home. In school everyone spoke English. Clarice Billberg was the teacher I remember most. She taught me to sew and embroider. That was so much fun! It was exciting to see my work at the county fair exhibit booth the following summer. I have enjoyed embroidery as a hobby all my life.
    “I recall distinctly, one morning when we came to school, our teacher announced, “We are at war!”  

   "Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor on the day before, December 7th, 1941. I also remember the feeling of shock I had when our teacher told us that President Roosevelt had died. That was Thursday April 12, of 1945. I had never known another President in my life so that was a very sad day for me and everyone else too. I feel privileged to have attended the old one-room school.  

    District 44 schools operated from 1903-1946 at which time they were closed and consolidated with the school district 62W in Wannaska. District 44 East, the Torfin school, was moved to Wannaska to be used as a classroom and was later torn down or moved away when the new school was built. Fortunately 44 West remains on its original site.

Palmville Sky over District 44 West