Kingsley Life
Undaunted
Joy
Educating Kingsley: Women Who Taught, and Stayed
Can you imagine the excitement felt by the hundreds of young mid-Western women as they stepped off the train in Montana to their first teaching position, on the prairie? The were raised in gentler worlds — brick schoolhouses, clean boardwalks, homes with wallpaper and gaslight. What they found on the prairie was different: drafty one-room buildings, stoves that barely fought the cold, and students whose native tongue might be German, Italian, Russian or French. Yet they stayed. They taught in boots and wool skirts and chopped kindling before lessons. These women—most unmarried, many far from home—did more than teach. They danced with locals — some stayed, wed, and started families. In time, they became pillars of the community, trading comfort for meaning.
The first Kingsley School was held in Gottleib Schneidt’s homestead shack in the early 1920’s and was taught by Linka Preus. The next school was held at the Mangen place. Later a new building was constructed about two miles north of the Elmer Watters ranch. This building burned in 1931. It was replaced the same year, but the site was changed to one-half mile northwest of the Watters ranch. In 1944 the building was moved to a location between Raschkow’s and Schneidt’s. It was closed in 1959.
Some teachers of the Kingsley School were: Linka Preus, Valesca Gaar, W. F. Riddle, Mr. Isaacs, Charlie Garber, Ruth Yerby, June Marston, Ruth Ulrich, Alyne Huckins, Mrs. Dorr, Margaret Isaacs, Mrs. Cooley, Helen Irion, Marjorie Hall, Mrs. Jatko, Leigh McKaben and Pearl Nash.
–Echoing Footsteps
Infant Deaths on the Prairie
Life was precarious for homesteaders, and none felt it more deeply than families who lost infants on the Montana prairie. In the wide loneliness of Powder River Country, grieving families often buried their infants right on the homesteads — hilltops, grove edges, or family plots close to the homes they had built with such hope. These small graves, sometimes marked only by a wooden cross or a handful of stones, remind us of the price settlers paid in sorrow and resilience. Every tiny grave was a declaration: that even in the hardest circumstances, love and memory endured.
Many infants were buried on the land their families loved — tiny graves marking lives cut short by hardship, and held close by memory.
What’s For Dinner?
In her book Birthing the West, Montana State University’s Dr. Jennifer Hill (who grew up in Powderville, north of Kingsley) surmises the homestead diet heavily relied on bread made from area wheat milled at the Broadus Mill. That was until drought decimated the wheat crops, closing the mill in the the 1930s.
Fittingly, John and Marie Miller operated the mill. After its closing the Millers razed the structure and added rooms to their home, eventually creating the first Broadus hospital: Miller Hospital.
At right: When Lee Rayner hurt his arm crank-starting a car, he was put to use in the kitchen peeling potatoes until he was healthy enough to return to farm work.
Carrots, Carrots and More Carrots
During the first years wonderful gardens and crops were raised on the new soil, with very few weeds and ample rainfall. One year when young Amsdens returned to the Dakotas in the fall, [Kate’s parents H.L. and Mary] were left to harvest the garden . When they returned they had seven tubs of carrots. The mother wondered why in the world they wanted to plant all those carrots. In 1919 and 1920 drought came and in later years web-worms and grasshoppers came to plague the farmers.
— Kate Amsden, Echoing Footsteps
A Delicious Fruit
You would think with their high water content watermelons would have been extremely difficult to grow on the dry prairie, but as Ester Mae Rayner shows at right, Kingsley gardeners had bountiful watermelon crops. Although we can’t determine the exact variety they grew so successfully, the watermelon itself traces back more than 5,000 years to a variety grown in southern Africa. Early explorers were growing the fruit as far back as the 16th century in the New World. If you know what variety the homesteaders likely grew, we want to know! Contact us at inspire@kingsleymontana.org to enlighten us.