North Dakota: A Guide to the Northern Prairie StateFederal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of North Dakota
History
North Dakota: A Guide to the Northern Prairie State
Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of North Dakota
North Dakota; North Dakota -- Guidebooks
The first school in North Dakota, at Pembina, had an enrollment
of 60 children, white and half-breed, and courses in English were
supplemented by lessons in planting small grains, both intended for the
enlightenment of the "savage" Chippewa. The school was conducted until
1823, when, after the determination of the international boundary, many
of the Selkirkers moved north to Canada, thus breaking up the colony.
The missionaries were withdrawn, and the school and chapel remained
closed for a quarter century. When Father George Belcourt came to the
region in 1848, he reopened the Pembina Mission and founded another at
St. Joseph in the Pembina Mountains. A school conducted at St. Joseph
by the Sisters of the Propagation of the Faith received financial
aid from the Federal Government, the first Federal support given to
education in this State.
In the early settlements of the State, a mother would often gather the
children of the neighborhood in her home for instruction, and itinerant
teachers occasionally held classes in the tent cities which sprang
up in the wake of the railroad. As the communities grew, residents
cooperated in hiring teachers and building schools. The railroad
companies assisted by shipping lumber free for schools. Between 1853
and the attainment of statehood in 1889, 1,362 schools were opened,
many of them in country communities, taught by men or women who had
come West to homestead. A teacher's report on one such school, sent
to the superintendent of the Griggs County schools in 1886, recorded
that he had taught a 62-day term, with 15 pupils enrolled and daily
average attendance of 7 7/31; that his salary was $35 a month; and that
the school building and grounds were in good condition, the former
containing a "Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, New 8-Inch Terrestrial
Globe, New Forms and Solids for object Teaching and Two Slate black
boards."
By 1883 two institutions of higher education had been founded in the
northern half of Dakota Territory. Jamestown College, the first school
in the State to offer a normal course, had been established by the
Presbyterian Church, and three months later the Territorial assembly
voted to found a University of North Dakota at Grand Forks. Originally
a liberal arts college, this institution extended its curriculum
until, in 1889, it included a law school, a college of mechanical
engineering, and a school of mines. In its first year the university
had an enrollment of 79; during 1936, 2,555 attended classes or took
correspondence work in its six colleges.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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