The children depicted on our wall may not look like today’s students, but in many ways they are the same. Their clothes are different and the schoolhouses they attended and lessons learned may be too, but like children everywhere they both looked forward to and dreaded the beginning of the school year.
In the 1880s, Colorado Springs was a new town, but it was growing steadily. Families were arriving daily and with them the need for schools. Mrs. Palmer taught the first school in the community. It was held in a private residence, and she provided the classroom furniture, including an organ. Queen Palmer soon turned over her duties to Mrs. Liller, and the school was moved to the Out West newspaper building on Tejon Street. In August 1872, School District 11 was formed, and its boundaries were drawn. During the next fifteen years Colorado Springs’ school children were taught in many locations. Space was rented in buildings, and grades were spread over town; sometimes split sessions were employed in order to meet the needs of the population. The building of new schoolhouses was a high priority for the city planners. Even with the best of intentions, they could not keep up with the demand.
During the decade of the 1880s these children may have attended Liller, Lowell, Lincoln or Garfield schools which were large brick buildings with two or three stories. These buildings had spacious rooms holding many students, and large windows for natural lighting and ventilation. Colorado Springs’ students may also have gone to school in the many frame annex buildings, or in rented spaces with bare floors and a central stove for heat in the winters. Wherever they attended school, it was soon over crowded.
Providing adequate school space was a problem for the adults then, as it is now. The children had their own worries and delights, and while some are different from today’s youth many are the same. The school kids of pioneer days used slate and chalk instead of a computer to do their lessons. Sometimes they had to ignore the sight of passing Cheyenne and Arapahoe to concentrate during instruction. The girls wore dresses and ribbons in their long hair. The boys wore knickerbockers (short pants buckled at the knee) with long stockings. At some locations the boys and girls attended separate classrooms. They brought homemade lunches to school in pails. They did not have hot lunch. Like the children today, they rode their bikes to school and looked forward to recess and summer vacation. They learned to read and write and do arithmetic. They did homework, worried about tests and had favorite teachers. They made life long friends.
The children on the wall are really not so different from those of today. They only look that way.
Sources:
Seibel, Harriet, A History of Colorado Springs Schools District 11, Century One Press, Colorado Springs, CO 1975.
Sommers, Herbert M., Pioneer Colorado Springs, Herbert M. Sommers by Peerless Graphics, Inc., Colorado Springs, CO, 1966.
Sprague, Marshall, Newport in the Rockies, Sage Books, Denver, CO, 1961.
Painted by:
Written by: Darcy Mazel