Then her betrothed turns out to actually be far worse than his reputation, so headstrong Sibyl decides life as a peasant, or even death, would be preferable to a future with such a despicable man, and makes plans to run away. A man who, by reputation, is one of Scotland's cruelest lairds in over a century.īut what choice does she have, with her father dead and her uncle now married to his brother's widow, putting him in charge of not only the Blackthorne fortune, but Sibyl's future as well? By 1966, the one-room country school had become a thing of the past.Sibyl Blackthorne isn't afraid of anything-except maybe being sold into marriage to a man she doesn't love.
School districts consolidated, pooling their resources to provide more teachers, broader curriculum, and opportunity for extracurricular activities. Equipped with little more than a blackboard and a few textbooks, teachers passed on to their pupils cultural values along with a sound knowledge of the three Rs.īy the turn of the century, the population began to shift to the cities and country schools began to lose students and tax support. She had to be a nurse, janitor, musician, philosopher, peacemaker, wrangler, fire stoker, baseball player, professor, and poet for less than $50 a month. The school teacher, sometimes slightly older than her pupils, was a renaissance individual. When they arrived on their first day of school they may have only known how to speak a foreign language but they soon learned how to speak, read, spell, and write English.
They got to school on foot, on horseback, or in a wagon. The children who attended ranged in age from five to 21 and endured dust storms, prairie fires, and cattle drives swirling past the school house in order to get an eighth grade education. They were called names like Prairie Flower, Buzzard Roost, and Good Intent.
For a hundred years, white frame or native stone one-room schoolhouses dotted the section corners across Kansas.
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