Agnes Burns Hartley's first school, at Crystal

In September 1963 Delta Kappa Gamma, an honor society for women in the teaching profession, held its fall luncheon, and a panel of retired teachers took the floor. The Idaho State Journal gave each panelist a few lines. Mrs. Agnes Hartley of Rockland got only a sentence, which noted that Crystal, Idaho, was where her teaching began. The rest of it described a rancher's wife who had paid for her own education and had brought up children while teaching for many years. The paper said nothing more about Crystal. But nearly fifty years earlier the American Falls Press had followed that first school, which stood in the Crystal district of Arbon Valley.

Miss Burns of Rockland

In May 1915 Agnes Burns was one of the graduates at the American Falls High School commencement. In July the Press noted that she and two other young women of Rockland had come home from summer school at Albion. That same week she and Erma Sanders of Rockland sat the teachers' examination at the county superintendent's office, with sixteen others. The paper said most of them would teach in Power County in the coming year.

By autumn she was teaching in Crystal, the high basin whose creeks run down into Bannock Creek, which made up School District 14. Crystal Central School had been built in 1912, but the district covered about fifty square miles, and smaller schools served its outlying families. Hers was in what the paper called the Thacker neighborhood. That November the county agent arranged pea-growing and hog-wintering demonstrations on several Crystal farms, Joe Thacker's among them. The papers read for this post do not say where the schoolhouse stood.

The school in the Thacker neighborhood

The county school notes of December 2, 1915, reported:

Miss Agnes Burns, A. F. H. S. '15, is teaching a successful term of school in the Thacker neighborhood.

Her November honor roll for attendance listed Eddie, Ila and Josie Norton, James, Julian and Joseph Thacker, and George and Lottie Stewart. (Some of these names are blurred in the newspaper text. Lottie is read with help from her March report.) The same note said she had recently spent a weekend with her sister Bessie, a student in the American Falls school.

On December 9 the Arbon and Crystal teachers met at the Pauline meeting house. Agnes Burns was listed among the Crystal teachers there, along with Olive Beale and Lola Skartvedt, who spoke at the meeting about the hot lunches at the Clifton Creek school. After Christmas the school notes described her own holiday program:

Miss Agnes Burns held a very nice Christmas entertainment in her tiny school room. In order to accommodate the guests the children's desks [had] to be moved out and seats made of planks supported on chunks of wood were put in. "Where there's a will, there's a way." This looks almost impossible for some of the rest of us.

At the end of January 1916 she and Lola Skartvedt came in from the Crystal district to the county teachers' and trustees' meetings at American Falls. The same report said the snow was so bad that the teacher from Roy took a day and a half to make the trip. In March she reported Joseph and Julian Thacker and Lottie and George Stewart perfect in attendance for the month.

She did not come back for a second year. In November 1916 the school notes put a new teacher, V. O. Humphrey, "in the Thacker neighborhood." One of her pupils did reach the paper again. In May 1921 the county superintendent named George Stewart of Crystal, the only graduate listed from the Thacker school, as the best of the eighth-grade graduates from the county's district schools that year. He was very probably the George Stewart on her honor rolls of 1915 and 1916.

Mrs. Will Hartley

In June 1917 the Press told how William Hartley and Agnes Burns, "recently married," came out of the Hotel Remington in American Falls just as the Chautauqua parade ended. The band surrounded their automobile and kept on playing until the cigars were produced. By August they were "Mr. and Mrs. Will Hartley of Landing," in the Rockland Valley, west of Arbon Valley across the hills. In the spring of 1918 Mrs. Agnes Hartley was teaching the Landing school, and her pupils formed a garden club to raise money for war thrift stamps. A daughter was born to the Hartleys that July. In 1920 and 1921 her mother, Mrs. Agnes Burns of Nampa, spent several weeks with her "daughter Mrs. Wm. Hartley at Landing." These visits are what tie the young Crystal teacher to Mrs. Hartley of Rockland. In the fall of 1921 Mrs. Agnes Hartley was again on the county's list of rural teachers.

What is not known

The papers read for this post do not give her birth date or birthplace, where she taught in 1916–17, how many years she taught, or when she died. They do not say where the Thacker schoolhouse stood or what became of it.

On this site: Crystal, the first schools at Crystal, the schools of Arbon Valley, and another valley teacher's career in Lila Wade, teacher in Arbon's one-room schools.

The story as reported

Idaho State Journal, September 19, 1963, page 20. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

Seven retired teachers, all members of the chapter, sat on a panel at Delta Kappa Gamma's fall luncheon on Saturday, presumably September 14, and talked about classroom life in earlier times. The society honors women in education. Back then, they recalled, a month's salary might be anywhere from $50 to $90, and rural schools were eager to take on teachers who had only finished the eighth grade.

Mrs. Agnes Hartley of Rockland and Mrs. Thelma Sweet of American Falls joined five Pocatello women on the panel: Mrs. Royal Brown, Agnes Asklof, Mrs. Hannah Sessions, Sylvia Smitham and Kathryn Burggraf.

The paper spared Mrs. Hartley only one sentence. In it she appears as a rancher's wife and a mother who kept at teaching through a long career on top of the demands of farm life. She had earned her own way through school, and her first classroom was at Crystal, Idaho.

Kathryn Burggraf left the profession in 1951. She was sixteen when she first taught in Idaho, and she earned degrees at the University of Washington and Stanford by going back to school off and on over the years. At one time or another she worked at the teachers' college in Albion, as a state education supervisor and as a county superintendent; Houghton Mifflin also employed her for fifteen years, advising on editorial matters and on reading.

Two of the women read poems they had written. Sylvia Smitham, who taught Latin in Pocatello for years, read a piece on why teaching was worth the effort. Hannah Sessions, who led the discussion and had been Pocatello's dean of girls, read verse of her own written in response to the Second World War. Agnes Asklof described how demanding Iowa had been about student teaching before it would certify her; she afterward came to Idaho and taught at Wendell and Pocatello. Thelma Sweet had left the business department at American Falls High School that year. Idaho schools used a typing workbook she wrote, which won praise from the Gregg Publishing Co., and on three separate occasions students of hers earned a trip to Hollywood for work in aviation education. Next on her calendar was a long trailer tour of the country with her husband, ending with a Florida winter.

Mrs. Brown's path began with history and government at the University of Colorado, after which she did social work in Denver attached to Judge Ben B. Lindsey's court. Her research into the West carried her to a master's at the University of California and into several books, of which Fort Hall on the Oregon Trail is the most widely read. Teaching had never been her plan, yet she ended up on college faculties in both Minnesota and Idaho.