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Carbon County chronicler, Richard Thayer, is preserving his community’s past by researching its school districts
Using old public school records such as this Clerk’s School District Record, Richard Thayer has been able to add to the understanding of the history of Carbon County. [Photo by Kim Thielman-Ibes]
By Kim Thielman-Ibes Thomas Hogan, a homesteader from Minnesota came west in the late 1800s and chose a plot of ground in Carbon County, Montana to claim, farm, and settle with his family. A man of some means, Hogan set about ensuring that his three children would not live an uneducated life. Around 1887, he built a small log building and brought a teacher, Margaret Gardiner, from back east so his children could start school. This school became known as the Hogan School, the first school in Carbon County - predating Red Lodge’s educational ambitions by three years. This original school building no longer exists nor do most of the stories once held within its mud-chinked walls. And it’s stories like this that geologist and chemist Richard Thayer is working hard to preserve, one Carbon County School at a time. The Hogan School was one of seventy schools founded in the high mountains and fertile valleys of Carbon County during the homestead boom, when schools were built on sections sixteen and thirty-six in each township such that no county resident would have to walk or ride horse more than three miles for school. Redistricting, consolidation, transportation, and density have whittled the number of Carbon County School districts to ten. Much of the county’s school history, along with the original school buildings and the memories of those who attended is quietly disappearing. Richard Thayer is on a quest to insure that each of these original school districts is identified, documented, and remembered. “In my mind the central point of this whole project is the sense of history and community created by studying the schools,” says Thayer. His project started with a book he inherited from his grandfather - a Carbon County school clerk in the 1930s and 1940s. His grandfather would keep a record of the financing of the district and more importantly, the school census conducted every summer. The census would track the number of school age children expected the following fall and determine the amount of money collected from the state to hire teachers and pay school expenses. “I figured out that writing the school history was writing a community history everyone except the Norwegian bachelor farmers was included and even then many of them were on the school boards.” Thayer’s great-grandparents were part of the early twentieth century homesteading boom in Montana, they also settled in Carbon County. Thayer and his many cousins still live on some of the land that his forbearers claimed, (Cont’d on p. 25)