District: No. 60
Location Relative to Con. 8: 2.0 miles East, 6.0 miles North
Year of District Formation: 1901-1902
Teachers
Orin Bradley
Miss Stevens (lived in Snyder in the 1990’s)
Ray Burton (brother of Ruby (Burton) Heien) in 1937-1938 at least.
Principal
None Listed
School Board
None Listed
Building
One room, but two teachers about half the time.
This school, just north of Gladson, was better known as Frog Pond. The area is flat and water stood on large areas, producing ideal conditions for the proliferation of frogs in wet times. Another school, No. 90 near Lone Wolf, also had the name Pleasant Valley, so the nickname is more specific. The nickname, “Mud Pond”, was also used for the district 60 school, another reflection of the hydrographic conditions in the area.
According to Balyeat1,2 this school operated through the 1946-47 school year, and part was officially annexed to Con. 8 in 1949. However, Alma (McKinnis) Fowler remembered that George McKinnis’s daughters attended Frog Pond until the 1938-1939 school year, when they transferred to Con. 8. Hazel was in the 8th, Alma in the 7th, and Francis Jo in the 4th that year; all three transferred. Also George was elected to Con. 8 School board in 1941. This is another example of the involvement of students from these surrounding districts while their district school was still operating and long before official annexation. Bufford Lowell who lived on the land just south and a bit east of the McKinnis farm, remembers transferring from “Frog Pond” to Con. 8 when he was in the 2nd grade. This would have been the 33-34 school year. Bufford had older sisters, but they never attended Con. 8, so this is an example of a transfer from a neighboring district under conditions that do not seem related to the unavailability of class offerings in the districts for any family member.
I am interested in any clues toward learning about the petitioning process by which these transfers were made, and what financial arrangements were made. Among the county records for the schools that have been preserved. I found one document dealing with the attendance record for four students who transferred from District 58 (called Withrow or Rusler lying just north of Roosevelt) to Con. 8 during the 1926-27 school year. The document includes a calculation of the transfer fee. For that year the cost of operation per student per month as established by the County Superintendent was $2.25 for common school and $4.89 for high school.
In the spring of 1938, the Con. 8 grade school softball team played a doubleheader at Frog Pond (which the student paper referred to as Pleasant Valley). Con. 8 lost both and the coach there, Ray Burton, said that his team would return the visit the next week. That was too late for the results to be reported in the paper. Another softball doubleheader was reported the next spring (1939) when Pleasant Valley visited Con. 8, who won both games.
Goldie Cooper, has written a history of this school published in the Pioneering in Kiowa County, Vol. 1 (PKC-1), p270.3 I overlooked this for some time as the title reads: “Pleasant Valley, District Number 90“, which is the proper description of the school near Lonewolf. Finally, I noted the byline for Goldie Cooper who I knew had lived in the “Frog Pond” community. She does not use the nickname, but it is clear from the names of the early settlers and the teacher list that her subject is district 60. The school position is given as on the Louie Lanig farm. The 1913 plat of the township shows the school on the farm owned then by Alvis Lanig. In the 1920 census, there is a person listed as Alois Lanig. It seems likely that these are all the person Mrs. Cooper refers to as Louie.
Mrs. Cooper lists many teachers not in the list above. Many of those are teachers who also taught at other schools within the final Con. 8 area. Bufford Lowell remembered Mr. Orin Bradley, but Mrs. Cooper lists two apparently different Bradley’s, Mrs. Orin Bradley and Morey Bradley.
Sources
1. Pioneering in Kiowa County, v 6, pg 18. This reference refers to the pages 18-39 of that volume, which is titled Kiowa County Schools. The first part is a general history of Kiowa County Schools It is stated in an Editor’s Note that “This History of Kiowa county school was prepared by Frank A. Balyeat, Field Representative, Department of Manuscripts, The University of Oklahoma Library, Norman, Oklahoma. It was researched by Sally Mansell, Hobart, Oklahoma”. Within the text, Dr. Balyeat refers to the time of writing as 1958.
2. History of the Schools of Kiowa County 1901-1958 by Dr. Frank A. Balyeat. I first learned of this from a footnote in the article about Mullins (Pioneering in Kiowa County, v 2, pg 256); but there was no indication of a publisher or whereto find copies. Maggie (Barnes) Walker obtained a copy of it from the Kiowa County Courthouse Files, with the help of Patti Johnson who seems to be able to achieve miracles. My inspection indicates that the material in Pioneering in Kiowa County, v 6 is the same as the original report and not a revised version. There is no indication of to whom the report was made or if it was published. I will give the Pioneering in Kiowa County, v 6 page numbers as that is most accessible published form known to me. This is a scholarly work with a very comprehensive discussion of the early school system. It also contains extensive numerical data. I have not yet been able to determine exactly what all the source documents were. I think that some may be the archives of the County Superintendent’s office.
3. Pioneering in Kiowa County, v 1, pg 270. Goldie Cooper tells a lot about “Frog Pond” or Pleasant Valley, district 60, although the title says district 90.