Wyoming’s First Public Schools: Early Emphasis on Education in the Equality State
By Phil Roberts
- Public schools, started even before territorial government, were the subject of a separate article in the state’s Constitution drafted in 1889. By statehood in 1890, every town had a school and six even had high schools (Cheyenne, Laramie, Rawlins, Evanston, Buffalo, Sundance).
Country schools educated rural students throughout the state and, at the beginning of statehood, Wyoming residents proudly noted that literacy rates were close to universal—a considerable change from those territorial times when some residents viewed education with “indifference.”
Public school education dates to the earliest days of Wyoming Territory, even before the first territorial legislature authorized public funding for schools. The first schools, however, were private, established on the military posts of Fort Laramie (1852) and Fort Bridger (1860).
Cheyenne, founded in July 1867, was the first place where a public school was opened in the territory. Just two months after Gen. Grenville Dodge laid out what would become the Union Pacific’s division point, new residents starting talking about the need for a school for the estimated 100 children aged four to 14 years old.
Vigilante violence, still in full swing in the rough railroad construction town, didn’t deter the town council from appointing a three-man committee to choose a location and construct a school. The wooden structure went up during the late winter of 1867 on 18th Street in the downtown close to the numerous saloons, cafes, and other business buildings thrown up to capture the railroaders’ trade.
On January 6, 1868, “a large assemblage of ladies and gentlemen” gathered in the newly built school for the dedication ceremonies. Outside, the temperature stood at 25 below zero, “but notwithstanding this, the large room was densely crowded,” the local newspaper reported. The reporter optimistically wrote that the presence of the school would “redeem our city from the rule of crime and vice.” More than 110 students attended the Cheyenne school that first year.
Later that summer of 1868, the first school in Laramie was opened. Forty students took classes in the primary school that first year.
Elsewhere in the territory, however, schools weren’t as readily available to the school-aged population.
“There is no school of any kind in this county,” wrote J. W. Wardman of South Pass City in the summer of 1870. He attributed the cause to “indifference on the part of parents” or, even worse “an avaricious disposition to make the propagation of children return early profits, or their superstitious dread that a little learning is a more dangerous thing…than blasting a mine, driving an ox team, or taking in washing and marrying early.”
Later that year, however, a public school did open in South Pass City. The teacher, James Stilman, started the school before the county furnished any funds for it. He took the chance of receiving his pay once the school taxes were levied and collected. The county later paid his back salary. Stilman, a native of South Carolina, didn’t have a background in teaching. A miner in the California gold rush, he later became the first editor of the San Francisco Call newspaper, coming to South Pass City initially in the gold rush in 1868.
Carbon County also had difficulties starting its first public school. As A. B. Donnelly wrote from “Rawlings Springs” to the Commissioner of Education in 1870: “There is not one public school within the limits of the county.” While two small private schools operated by charging tuition, “the financial condition of the county has rendered it impossible thus far to spend any money for school purposes.”
In the entire territory in 1870, only four public schools held sessions with four teachers (two men and two women). The entire education budget for the four schools amounted to $2,876.From the shaky beginnings, however, education gained community support throughout the territory. Eight students attended Evanston’s first school in 1871. Classes were held on the second floor of a Front Street saloon.
Other towns along the Union Pacific Railroad opened schools in the early 1870s. Sufficient access to public schools existed that the 1873 legislature made school attendance mandatory for at least three months for all students 7-16 years old. Dozens of teachers convenedannually at “teacher institutes” to learn the latest in education techniques.