John Wayne Walked Into A One-Room Schoolhouse In Montana 1957 — Then He Saved It D

September 1957, Glacier County, Montana. A one room schoolhouse 12 miles north of Cutbank at the end of a gravel road that turns to mud in the spring and freezes solid by November. The county board of education meets on a Tuesday evening in the courthouse basement in Shelby. They vote 4 to1 to close the school at the end of the fall term.

The single dissenting vote belongs to a man named Harold Fitch who farms 400 acres south of the Maras River and whose youngest daughter is in the third grade at that school. His vote changes nothing. The school will close in December. The children will be bus to cut bank 31 mi each way. In winter, here is the story.

The schoolhouse was built in 1931 by the families of the Birch Creek Valley, 12 of them, with lumber hauled up from Great Falls on a flatbed. They built it in 4 days in August. A single room 22 ft by 30 with eight double hung windows and a cast iron stove in the northeast corner and a cloak room off the back where the children hung their coats and left their overshoes in a row on the floor.

One of the Valley men, Carl Gruber, had been a school teacher in Wisconsin before he homesteaded, and he drove the flagpole plum himself with a carpenters’s level. It went in straight. It is still straight. Then in the fall of 1951, a woman named Margaret Connelly came up from Billings. She was 31 years old.

Her husband, a marine named Thomas Connelly, had been killed at the Chosan Reservoir the previous December. She had no children of her own. She had a teaching certificate from Montana State Normal School at Dylan and a trunk with her clothes in it and a cardboard box of books she had been collecting since she was a girl.

She took the position because it came with a two- room cottage beside the schoolhouse and because she wanted to be somewhere very quiet for a while. She did not leave. By September of 1957, Margaret Connelly had been teaching in that schoolhouse for 6 years. She taught reading and arithmetic and geography and history and the rudiments of science.

She taught the older children to help the younger ones because in a one- room school with eight grades, you have no other choice. She knew every child in the valley, their names, and their older brothers and sisters who had passed through before them, which families were struggling and which were not.

She had never missed a day of school for illness. She had missed three days in six years, all three when the road was impassible. The county board’s decision reached her by letter on a Wednesday morning in late September. two paragraphs. The first cited declining enrollment, 14 children that fall, down from 22 the year the Korean War ended because three families had left the valley for work in Great Falls and Billings.

The second paragraph cited the cost of maintaining the building, which needed a new roof and a repaired foundation on the east wall where the Frost Heave had been working at it for three winters. The total repair estimate was $3,200. The county had no budget for it. The school was no longer cost-effective. The children would be transferred to Cutbank Elementary beginning January 1958.

Margaret Connelly set the letter on her desk. Her 14 students were working on their morning arithmetic. She did not read it again until lunch. She wrote back to the county board that afternoon. She wrote that the road to Cutbank was impassible for an average of 31 days per year, according to the county road department’s own maintenance logs, which she had obtained from the county clerk’s office.

She wrote that a 31m bus ride in a Montana winter was not a reasonable expectation for a six-year-old child. She wrote that the repairs could be accomplished for significantly less if the materials were purchased wholesale and the labor was provided by Valley Families, as it had been when the school was built.

She estimated $800 in materials. She asked for a reconsideration. The board sent a second letter. The decision stood. Harold Fitch drove out to the schoolhouse on a Saturday afternoon to tell her in person. He sat in one of the student desks with his hat in his hands and told her he was sorry and that he had voted against it and that he did not know what else he could do. Margaret Connelly thanked him.

She offered him coffee. He took it. They sat for a while in the quiet school room with the October light coming through the eight windows. Then Harold Fitch put his hat on and drove home. That same Saturday afternoon, at the end of a section road 12 mi south, a battered pickup truck sat idling on the gravel shoulder.

The man behind the wheel had been driving since early morning, coming down from the Canadian border country, where he had been looking at ranch property with a friend. He had been going to cut east toward Shelby and then south toward Arizona where a picture was waiting. His back was tired and he was thinking about coffee.

He saw the handpainted sign at the road junction. Birch Creek School with an arrow. He turned down the gravel road the way a man sometimes turns down a road without deciding to just because it is there and the day has been long and straight. He pulled into the dirty yard in front of the schoolhouse.

The flag pole was there, plum and straight in its concrete base. The windows were clean. There was a stack of freshly split firewood against the south wall under a lean too. Enough wood for a hard winter. He got out of the truck. He was 50 years old in a canvas work jacket and a tan stats and worn pale at the crown.

He walked around the building slowly the way a man walks around something he is trying to understand. Margaret Connelly was inside correcting arithmetic papers at her desk. She heard the truck and then the footsteps on the porch boards and came to the door. She opened it and looked at the man on the porch.

She recognized the face and then decided she was wrong about what she recognized because men who looked like that did not turn up on the porch of a one- room schoolhouse in Glacier County, Montana on a Saturday afternoon. She said, “Can I help you?” He asked if he could come in and get warm. She said, “Yes.

” He came in and stood near the stove and looked around the room, the student desks in two rows, a map of the United States on the east wall, a map of the world on the west wall. On the north wall behind her desk, a long row of handlettered cards with the alphabet in both print and cursive. Every letter from A to Zed, each one drawn in the same careful hand.

He stood there looking at them. “You teach here?” he said. She said she did. He asked how many students. She said 14. He asked what grades. She said all eight. He looked at the room again. Just you, he said. She said yes. He nodded once. There was a coffee pot on top of the stove.

She poured him a cup without being asked and he took it and stood there drinking it and looking at the room. After a while, he asked how long she had been teaching here. She said 6 years. He said it was a fine building, well-kept. She said the Valley families kept it up. Then she said quietly until December. He looked at her.

She told him about the letter. She said it the way a person says a thing they have said enough times that the saying of it has gone flat. The county had decided. The repairs were too expensive. The children would go to cut bank. She did not ask him for anything. She was not the kind of woman who asked strangers for things.

He set the coffee cup on the corner of her desk. He asked her to write down the name of the county board chair and the address of the county education office in Shelby. She looked at him for a long second. He said, “Please.” She wrote it on a piece of notebook paper and gave it to him.

He folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket. He touched the brim of his Stson. He thanked her for the coffee and walked out. She went to the window and watched him walk to his truck. She still was not certain she had recognized him correctly. She told herself it did not matter. Nothing would come of it. A man stopped for coffee and now he was going on.

She went back to her arithmetic papers. Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this story reaches. He did not go to Shelby. He went to Great Falls. He made three phone calls from a hotel room that evening. The first was to a lawyer in Helena named George Portman who had done work for him before on Montana Property Matters.

The second was to a man in Los Angeles who knew people connected to foundations working in rural education. The third was to the hotel front desk asking for a Glacier County telephone directory. On Monday morning, George Portman drove to Shelby and met with the county board chair, Dale Senson, in Senson’s hardware store office.

Portman presented a proposal. An anonymous donor wished to fund the full repair of the Birch Creek Schoolhouse, the roof, the east foundation wall, and whatever the county inspector identified as necessary. The funds would arrive by certified check within 10 days. Two conditions.

The school would remain open for a minimum of 5 years from the date of repair and the donor’s name would not appear in any record, any minutes, or any public communication. Dale Senson was not a bad man. He looked at the proposal for a long time. He asked who the donor was. Portman said he was not at liberty to say.

Senson asked if this was legitimate. Portman put his card on the desk and let him read it. Senson said he would bring it to the full board. Portman said, “Of course.” The board voted 4 to one to accept. The certified check arrived on a Friday. It was drawn on a Helena Bank. The amount was $3,400, covering the full estimate with $200 left for contingency.

A roofing crew from Cutbank started work the first week of November and finished in 4 days. A foundation contractor from Hav repaired the east wall the second week. By Thanksgiving, the building had been inspected and approved. The school remained open. Margaret Connelly did not know any of this was happening until Dale’s Fenson drove out to the schoolhouse on a Monday afternoon in early November and told her himself.

He sat in one of the student desks with his hat in his hands, the same desk Harold Fitch had sat in a month before and told her the school was staying open. Anonymous donation, full repairs funded, 5-year guarantee. She asked who had done it. Senson said he did not know. The lawyer would not tell him and the check told him nothing.

She wrote a letter to George Portman and Helena that evening asking only if the person who had funded the repairs was aware of how much it meant. Portman wrote back two weeks later. The donor was aware, had asked specifically to be told the school was open, and had said that no thanks were necessary or wanted.

Portman passed along one additional comment which the donor had asked him to relay. It said a teacher who had taught eight grades alone for six years in a one room Montana schoolhouse had more than earned the right to keep doing it and the county ought to have figured that out for themselves.

Margaret Connelly taught at Birch Creek for 19 more years. She retired in 1976. The Valley families gave her a dinner at the Graange Hall in October of that year. Every family came. The children she had taught who were old enough to drive came back from Cutbank and Great Falls and Billings. a boy named Gary Lindström, who had been in her third grade class in 1954, was now teaching civil engineering at the University of Montana in Missoula.

He drove four hours each way and arrived late and ate cold food standing up and said it was worth it. The man who stopped for coffee in September 1957 drove on to Great Falls and then south toward Arizona and made his picture. He was 50 years old that fall with a long road still in front of him.

He never spoke of the schoolhouse in Glacier County to anyone. Not to a reporter, not to a friend, not in any letter that has ever been found. George Portman kept the confidence until he died in 1981. What is known comes from Dale Senson, who told the story once at a county commission meeting in 1979 when the question of closing a different rural school came up.

He said only that he had learned in 1957 that anonymous money sometimes showed up for small schools and out of the way places and that a man was foolish to turn it down. Margaret Connelly died in 1989 in the cottage beside the schoolhouse where she had lived since 1951. She was 69. She had never remarried. She had never left the valley for more than 2 weeks at a stretch.

Every morning of those 38 years, she had looked out her kitchen window and seen the flag pole standing straight in its concrete base, the way Carl Gruber had set it in 1931, and the flag on it moving in whatever the morning wind was doing. The Birch Creek Schoolhouse is still standing. It was consolidated into the Cutbank District in 1981, 24 years after the county tried to close it.

The building passed to the Glacier County Historical Society in 1983 and has been restored twice since, once in 1991 and once in 2009, using local donations both times. The cast iron stove is gone, replaced by a propane heater sometime in the 1970s, but the floor marks where it stood are still visible if you know where to look.

The flag pole is in its original base. The eight windows are the originals, reglazed in 1991. On the west wall of the school room below Margaret Conny’s old map of the world, there is a frame document. It is a copy of the county board resolution from November 1957 authorizing the acceptance of the anonymous donation and the continued operation of Birch Creek School.

Dale Senson’s signature is at the bottom and the three others who voted yes and the blank line where Royson refused to sign. Below that, in a separate frame, is a single index card and a woman’s careful handwriting. It says, “The school stayed open. We never learned who made it possible. We owed them 19 more years of children learning to read.

” The afternoon light comes through the west windows every day and reaches the east wall and lies for a while across both frames before it moves on. The gravel road is still there. In spring, it still turns to mud. In November, it still freezes solid. The sign at the junction still reads Birch Creek School with an arrow, though there has been no school at the end of that road for more than 40 years.

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