Saving The Howard Schoolhouse

The Howard Schoolhouse, which has been open to visitors since 1960, is currently closed due to several issues with the building, which dates to the 1870s. The Jackson County Historical Society, which owns the structure, is raising funds to restore the schoolhouse, which over many years hosted students who studied and played in the same ways as their counterparts had 150 years ago. Photo courtesy of The Kansas City Star.

To learn about how to donate to the restoration of the Howard Schoolhouse, go to jchs.org/save-our-schoolhouse

BY BRIAN BURNES

It’s February and students across Jackson County are in their classrooms, immersed in their spring semesters.

But one Independence school building remains closed. 

That’s the Howard Schoolhouse, the one-room 19th century building that had been open to visitors at the 1859 Jail Museum since 1960.

The 12-by-16 foot schoolhouse, which stands adjacent to the jail at 217 N. Main St., was placed on its current foundation in 1960. Concerns have arisen about the stability of the foundation and the Jackson County Historical Society, which owns both the jail and the schoolhouse, restricted visitor access out of an abundance of caution last autumn.

Among the many issues needing to be addressed at the Howard Schoolhouse is its peeling exterior white paint. The building’s two windows also need to be replaced, as well as its front door and transom. Photo courtesy of JCHS.

Beyond the possible foundation problem, the schoolhouse’s windows need to be repaired or replaced, as does its front door and transom. The building’s exterior walls need to be scraped of its peeling paint and re-painted; the schoolhouse’s interior walls need new paint as well.

Still other issues include the restoration of the interior wood flooring and wainscoting.

Society board members hope to one day to re-open the schoolhouse to visitors if it can secure the needed funds.
“The Society intends to be a proper steward of the historic structures that have been entrusted to it,” said Gloria Smith, Society president. 

“Just as the Society recently received generous financial assistance to complete needed repairs to the 1859 Jail Museum, it now respectfully asks supporters to consider assisting in the restoration of the Howard Schoolhouse,” Smith added.

The society received the building as a donation in 1959.

Both it, and one-room schoolhouses across the country, have a long legacy.

AN “EDUCATED CITIZENRY”

Federal support for rural schools in America originated with the Land Ordinance of 1785, which authorized surveyors to measure and define the boundaries of townships across the growing country. 

Particular sections of land in each township would be set aside for educational purposes.

A vast amount of more land became available with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Before long the sentiment sometimes attributed to President Thomas Jefferson - the importance that an “educated citizenry” would have in making the flourishing of democracy possible - manifested itself in many ways, and especially in the one-room schoolhouse.

Of the estimated 200,000 one-room schoolhouses built across the expanding country, about 90,000 would be built in rural areas of the Midwest.

Settlers made them out of sod, logs, brick or wood, depending on the surrounding materials.

But, in many cases the one-room schoolhouse would be a wooden frame building having one or two windows with a front door, and often would are painted white or sometimes red.

There students of surrounding farms could go to receive instruction in reading, writing and arithmetic. The Howard Schoolhouse currently displays the numerals one through 10 on a rectangle of chalkboard paint, as well as seven letters of the alphabet in large cursive script.

The Howard Schoolhouse, like many others, also contains objects intended to inspire patriotism. It displays an American flag as well as a small portrait of George Washington. Nineteenth century educators often believed that the one-room schoolhouse was where children of different ethnicities or religious backgrounds could together receive instruction in what it meant to be an American, and what their civic responsibilities would include as citizens.

“Almost every story in the McGuffey Reader reprints we would use would have a message,” said Mary Childers, an Independence teacher who in 1975 began bringing elementary grade students to the schoolhouse for a week of frontier instruction.

“The messages would be ‘Be honest. Be true. Be a good, honorable person.’ ”

The decline of the one-room schoolhouse would begin in the early 20th century.

In 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt established the National Commission on Country Life. 

After a Kansas City crane and hauling company in 1959 moved the Howard Schoolhouse from Lee’s Summit to the 1859 Jail courtyard in Independence, Jackson County Historical Society volunteers began to restore it. JCHS image no. PHS 11000.

The new road networks inspired by Roosevelt’s mandate, intended to increase transportation options for rural residents, also improved access to schools that then often were being reorganized into expanding consolidated school districts, serving more students from an ever-wider area.

By the 1950s the remaining one-room schoolhouses either had been razed by those seeking to re-use the materials, converted to sheds for storing seed or farm implements, or simply abandoned.

An estimated 400 of them survive.

Today the Country School Association of America, a Texas organization which promotes the preservation of historic rural schoolhouses, currently lists 77 such buildings on its registry. 

Although the Howard Schoolhouse is not listed, six Missouri buildings are, including the Mt. Gilead School in Kearney, in Clay County.

The Jackson County Historical Society dedicated the donated Howard Schoolhouse at its new location in 1960. Standing with Howard Adams (right), Society president, are William Bullitt Howard, Jr. and William T. Howard. JCHS image no. PHL 23073.

The Howard Schoolhouse, however, enjoys its own unique heirloom status.

William T. Howard, grandson of William Bullitt Howard, a 19th century settler from Kentucky and today considered the founder of Lee’s Summit, donated the schoolhouse to the Society in 1959.

Society members restored the building and, following a dedication ceremony, opened it to visitors in June of 1960.

The schoolhouse since has been the source of fond memories of an unknown number of Jackson County elementary age students.

For many years approximately 1,000 Independence School District first-grade have visited the schoolhouse as part of their annual visit to the 1859 Jail Museum.

Leidulf Mydland, a Norwegian scholar, in a 2011 study, forwarded the idea that today the American one-room schoolhouse serves as a “heritage object” or icon - a symbol right up there the log cabin and general store in our country’s national narrative of westward expansion.

But in Independence, 50 years ago, a specific group of students began using the Howard Schoolhouse not as an abstract symbol of the nation’s pastoral past but a working classroom where they prepared for their individual futures.

TURNING BACK THE CLASSROOM CLOCK

Beginning in 1975 Mary Childers, who with a colleague in 1971 had established a small private school known as The Schoolhouse, began bringing students to the Howard Schoolhouse for a one-week full-immersion experience in frontier education.

The devotion of Childers to authenticity and accuracy was total. 

For many years, Independence teacher Mary Childers organized week-long classroom sessions at the Howard Schoolhouse, where students dressed in period apparel and studied using classroom materials inspired by those used in the 1870s. Photo courtesy of The Kansas City Star.

Students arrived at the Howard Schoolhouse dressed in period apparel and carried lunches - servings of chicken, or apple turnovers - that children in the 1870s would have eaten, wrapped not in aluminum foil or zip-lock plastic bags but in kerchiefs or squares of spare cloth. 

During class time students would bend over penmanship exercises or study reprints of McGuffey Readers, the 19th century textbooks that built reading and writing skills.

The interior of the schoolhouse - thought to have been built in the 1870s - would come to include a portrait of George Washington - suggested, Childers said, by her students. 

Did the students recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning? 

They did not.

“The pledge was written in 1892,” Childers said during a recent interview.

Her students, remember, were respecting their counterparts of the 1870s.

For the week the students took on the actual names of the seven Howard children, copied down by Childers from the will of William B. Howard, who died in 1896.

Their names: Annie, Maria, Mary, Thomas, Robert, Florence and William.

“I had one student who was Florence every year,” Childers said. “She would say ‘I am Florence.’ “

When they ran out of Howard siblings Childers would offer names of children who, according to census records, lived on neighboring farms.

The concept of Childers’ frontier educational experience went back to 1960, her first year as an elementary grade teacher in the Independence School District.

“I had been reading the students ‘On the Banks of Plum Creek,’  one of the Laura Ingalls Wilders novels in which Laura and her sister Mary go to school for the first time,” she said.

Soon Childers scheduled a day when she turned off the classroom lights and covered the clock.

She and her students then proceeded to turn back the clock to the 19th century, studying the McGuffey Reader reprints and spending recess playing hoops and stick, and other frontier games.

Childers and a colleague established their own independent school in 1971. Some three years later Hazel Graham, then a historical society board member, invited Childers to take her students to the Howard Schoolhouse.

“Hazel said ‘Come for a week,’ “ Childers said.

So Childers did, bringing students to the Howard Schoolhouse every year from 1975 through 2022, when she retired.

One former student, Megan Stark Evans, in 1996 wrote a remembrance of her visits to the Howard Schoolhouse.

Classroom work in the 1870s could be no picnic, as this student seemed to realize while practicing his penmanship during one of Mary Childer’s Howard Schoolhouse sessions. Photo courtesy of Mary Childers.

“We wrote with slates and slate pencils and pen and ink,” she remembered, adding that she and other classmates “learned and recited Bible verses, studied from historic textbooks, had spelling bees, sang songs, baked bread and made butter, packed our lunches with food they would have eaten in those days, planted herbs and flowers in the courtyard garden, and played with the toys children would have played with back then.”

The Howard Schoolhouse - the actual building - stood sturdy while hosting the energetic 20th century students.

One day one of them alertly noted a crack in the building’s south wall, as well as some apparent infill material collecting on the floor. Going outside to investigate, Childers and the student discovered just what it was.

“It was busted-up brick,” Childers said. 

The technical term for that material was “nogging,” known to builders and architects as a loose material that cab serve as insulation.

“I thought ‘By golly, that’s an extra touch they added,’ “ Childers said.

After classwork was done, students of Mary Childers (far right) played with hoops and sticks, as their 1870s counterparts likely did. Photo courtesy of JCHS.

Childers, meanwhile, believed that the reasonable facsimile of 19th century education she provided to her students needed to be just as sturdy and authentic as the Howard Schoolhouse.

“I felt obligated,” Childers said.

“The one thing that my students needed to know was that this was real - the Howards had been real people, a real family. 

“I’d grown up in Independence, which is full of stories, some true, some not. 

But with the Howard Schoolhouse, I wanted to verify what I did with my students

So, they would call each other the names of the Howard children, as well as the children from neighboring farms, all week long.

“And they loved it.”

William Bullitt Howard, who built the Howard Schoolhouse for his children in the 1870s, continued to provide support for their education after his 1896 death. His will directed that any expense for education for his children would “be borne by my entire estate”before any property was to be distributed. JCHS image no. PHM 22731.

BUILDING THE SCHOOLHOUSE

It figures then that William Bullitt Howard did not cut corners when building his family’s schoolhouse.

He was a man with resources.

With his first wife, Maria Duncan Strother, he came to Jackson County in 1844 and acquired hundreds of acres of land, some of it near “Big Cedar,” a spot in south-central Jackson County where a post office would be built. 

In 1854 the Howards built a two-story Greek Revival home, which stood southwest of what is today the intersection of Missouri 291 and Woods Chapel Road.

But theirs was not always a happy time.

William Bullitt Howard built this two-story Greek Revival home for his family in 1854, southwest of what is today Woods Chapel Road and Missouri 291. It burned down in 1967. JCHS image no. PHL 104A.

The Howards had three children, two of whom died.

Beyond that, the tension between anti-slavery “free staters” who then had arrived in eastern Kansas and pro-slavery residents of western Missouri sometimes erupted into violence, creating a legacy of bitterness and retribution.

Howard was a slave-owner; a recent article in the Kansas City Star estimated he owned 12 enslaved persons.

During the Civil War, Union forces in western Missouri knew about Howard and in 1862 a Union officer arrested him. Howard spent a month in the 1859 Jail before being released after posting a $25,000 bond and promising to move his family back to Kentucky for the balance of the war. 

Howard’s wife Maria died during their exile.

Howard returned to Jackson County in 1865. With him he brought the body of his deceased wife, and interred her in a family cemetery. That burial ground is still there, near where the home - which burned in 1967 - once stood. Maria lies there now, as do her two sons, William and John, who died in 1851 and 1853, respectively.

In October of 1865, Howard filed the plat for the Town of Strother, named for Maria, and set aside 70 acres of farmland that became what is now the downtown district of contemporary Lee’s Summit.

In 1867 Howard married an area school teacher, Mary Catherine Jones.

The first of their children - named Maria - was born in 1868, with five more children arriving over the subsequent 10 years.

“Often it was the mother of the family who taught the children,” said Erin Gray, the Society’s archives and education director. 

The Howard Schoolhouse stood just outside the Howard family home, visible through one of the home’s windows. JCHS image no. PHM 100.

But, in this case, Howard’s second wife was already a teacher. And, in that context, a Howard family schoolhouse is easy to understand, Childers said.

“So Mr. Howard has a new wife and they are starting to have babies and I’m sure she said ‘Honey, now that we are having kids, we need to educate them.

“ ‘Let’s build them a schoolhouse.’ ”

At one point the Howard children had two teachers, both from Independence, who received room and board at the Howard home as part of their salaries.

When Howard’s grandson donated the schoolhouse in 1959, Belger Cartage, the longtime Kansas City crane and heavy hauling company, moved it intact from Lee’s Summit to Independence, placing it on the eastern end of the 1859 jail courtyard, Childers said.

“The fact that the schoolhouse was saved is just so wonderful,” Childers said.

“For one thing, it exists.

“But the other thing is, the more I have gotten into the history of Jackson County, the Howard Schoolhouse just connects to everything that I know about these people - how they lived, how they knew each other, and how they believed they were here to civilize the frontier. 

“These were educated people, and they made sure their children would be educated, too.”

Brian Burnes is a former president of the Jackson County Historical Society.