“Kids today have it easy,” said the gray-haired man to his grandchildren as they alighted from their big yellow school bus. “When I was a boy, we walked a mile to school, in rainstorms or foot-deep snow, and the walk,” he said with a grin, “was uphill both ways.”
Many local grandparents and great-grandparents have uttered similar words to young family members, recalling their days as students in the numerous one-room rural schoolhouses that dotted the map of Kankakee County. During the first century of the county’s history, more than 150 such schools existed to meet the educational needs of farm families.
The earliest schools in what was then Will County (Kankakee County was established in 1853) date to the mid-1830s.These early schools, held in settlers’ log cabins, were not public institutions; they were private “subscription” schools.
The such first educational activity was recorded in 1836 at the home of Chesley Rakestraw on the Kankakee River downstream from present-day Aroma Park. Miss Stella Ann Johnson was the teacher. The year 1837 saw two more early schools. Miss Lorain Beebe taught children in the home of Asher Sargeant at “Lower Crossing” (present-day Momence), and a log schoolhouse built by Solomon Yoder opened on what is now Main Street in Bourbonnais. That log building, which served as a school until 1848, was reconstructed in 2022 by the Bourbonnais Grove Historical Society. It is now located on Stratford Drive East, next to the George R. Letourneau Home Museum.
Public schools began to be established as pioneer families settled on the open prairie lands of Kankakee County and established farms. The typical one-room school was a small wooden building that served a “student body” of a few to a dozen or more children, often ranging in age from five or six years to the mid-to-late teens. The teacher (usually a young woman) would live with the family of one of the students. The curriculum was the basic “readin’ and writin’ and ’rithmetic,” but might include such activities as music or art, depending upon the teacher’s skills and interests.
While most of the schools were wooden structures, some were constructed of brick or native limestone. One of the stone schoolhouses played a significant role in local history. The Mapes School, near the mouth of Wiley Creek in Limestone Township, was built in 1842. In 1853, it served as the polling place that provided the deciding votes in establishing Kankakee County. The building still exists as a private home.
Another stone schoolhouse with “a story” was located in what is now the community of Bonfield. In the early 1880s, when the town of Verkler was established, children from the surrounding area attended the Brown School, two miles to the east. Verkler’s residents voted to move the school into the town. The relocation angered parents living outside the town, who demanded that the wooden schoolhouse be moved back to its original location. After a lengthy period of heated debate, a compromise was reached: a new school would be built on the east edge of town. To forestall any future attempts at relocation, the building was constructed of stone.
A 1931 article in the Kankakee Daily Republican provided some interesting “one-room school” statistics. Assistant County Superintendent of Schools John Bouchard reported that there were 131 one-room elementary schools in Kankakee County, with an average enrollment of 15 students — the school with the smallest number of students had only three, while the largest classroom population was 37. Teacher salaries ranged from $70 monthly to $132, with an average of $108.19.
By 1945, the number of one-room school districts had peaked at 152, but the future held considerable change. A Kankakee County School Survey Committee was formed in that year to map out a plan for school consolidation, with the goal of eventually reducing the number of school districts in the county to 30.
Even before the committee’s report was delivered in January 1948, the number of schools had dramatically declined. “Through consolidations,” County School Superintendent Ruel Hall told the Kankakee Daily Journal, “the total number of districts in the county has already been lowered to 73 …. Society has progressed in this modern age on the whole much more rapidly than progress in the small elementary school …. The purpose of reorganization is to encourage larger units, which in turn can more advantageously afford better educational equipment, improved transportation and better educational opportunities.”
The committee’s report noted that “approximately one-half of the one- and two-room rural school districts … were in dire straits on the basis of small enrollments or small assessed valuation. The assessed valuation for the average one-room rural school of Kankakee County is not of adequate financial base to furnish equal educational opportunities for the youth of Kankakee County.”
The committee’s report outlined sweeping changes in the boundaries of larger school districts to absorb the territory, teachers and students of one-room schools. Especially in more sparsely populated areas of the county, multiple small districts were swept into a single unit. An example was Grant Park, where a dozen small school districts were to be combined in a “community consolidated district.”
Today, the number of public-school districts in Kankakee County is a round dozen, and the former one-room school buildings that survive have been repurposed as residences, storage buildings or adjuncts to community museums.
A future governor of Illinois spent a short period as a teacher in a Kankakee County one-room school. Who was he, and at what school did he teach?
Answer: Len Small, 26th Governor of Illinois (1921-1929). After completing his education at the Northern Indiana Normal School (now Valparaiso University), Small taught for a time at the Mapes School in Limestone Township. He went on to a career in agriculture and politics.