It’s a Pick-A-Book Giveaway.
This month enter to win any book from the catalog of books I’ve pinned.
Winners will be announced April 30.
Twenty-one-year-old Anna Webber rubbed her eyes and leaned against the rough wall of the sod schoolhouse where she taught. The view from the window of the small building framed the tall grass and wheat fields around Blue Hill, Kansas, perfectly. A slight breeze in the middle distance brushed across the tops of cottonwood trees lining the banks of the Solomon River, richly adding to the peaceful scene.
Anna squinted into the sunlight filtering into the tiny classroom and stretched her arms over her head. The one-room schoolhouse was empty of students, and the young teacher was sitting on the floor grading papers. The room was only big enough for a half a dozen pupils but served more than sixteen children on most days.
Inside the roughly constructed building, made from strips cut from the prairie earth found in abundance around the small settlement, the furnishings consisted of a chair for the teacher and several boards balanced on rocks for the students to sit on. There was no blackboard and no writing desks. The primitive conditions made Anna’s job more difficult than she had anticipated and robbed her of the joy she initially felt when she entered the profession.
The town in Mitchell County, Kansas, where Anna held her first teaching assignment in 1881, was a growing community of farmers and railroad workers. Five years before her arrival, the area had been ravaged by hordes of grasshoppers. The insects destroyed crops and drove settlers away for a time. The ever-advancing railroad brought many back to the fertile ground to raise corn, wheat, and rye. Anna’s family was among the people who returned to the region to start life anew.
