But Loads of Attention in Idaho’s One-Room Schools Story and Photos by Khaliela Wright Christine Marshall, a new hire in my job as a field supervisor for the US Census Bureau, had moved with her family from Michigan
A Tiny School Does “Something Crazy” By Mike Turnlund Photos courtesy of Clark Fork Junior-Senior High School Bonner County in northern Idaho still has not fully recovered from the Great Recession of December 2007 to June 2009, and
One Gate, and It’s Open By Ahmeena McMillion This story is offered free of charge online in its entirety for the first week of July. On January 17, 2015, I put my life into the hands of strangers.
Walking with my dog on a cold Saturday in March on a path that led through the College of Southern Idaho campus in Twin Falls, I smelled burning wood. Ages ago, this very place where I was walking would have held many tipis with wisps of smoke ascending above their high poles from warming fires within. Continue reading
When University of Idaho foreign exchange student Rafay Adeel arrived from Pakistan at the Moscow-Pullman Airport in August 2014, he had no idea that living, breathing Native Americans still walked the Earth. He thought European immigrants had killed them off years ago, during the Indian Wars, which in the Middle East have become as iconic of the American West as the cowboy. Continue reading
I have a theory that the place that feels like home is where you were in fourth grade. Maybe you’ve lived there all your life, or maybe you just spent a year or two there, but in fourth grade you learned about your state and its history before going on to study the wider world as you moved on through the upper grades. Continue reading
As this school year drew to a close and my seventeen-year-old son prepared to embark on his senior year, we pondered what he was going to do after high school.
When I was his age, I knew I would be attending the University of Idaho. I never considered any other schools. His future, however, is less certain. While my son busied himself with thoughts of the future, I found myself ruminating over Idaho’s educational past.
America’s well-laid foundations for free public education were not lost on early Idahoans, as I discovered when I decided to research the early days of the University of Idaho. It was established during the fifteenth session of the Legislature of the Territory of Idaho by the Organic Act of 1889, which said, “No student who shall have been a resident of the state for one year next preceding his admission shall be required to pay any fees for his tuition.” I think it’s significant that even before statehood was granted, this concept of a tuition-free university was established. And once statehood was achieved, the Idaho Legislature incorporated the Organic Act into the state constitution. Continue reading
Whenever I drive south from Kuna on Swan Falls Road toward the Snake River, I pass a little sign indicating a turnoff to a place called Initial Point. It’s a butte just one mile to the east on a good dirt road, but for me there always seemed to be some excuse not to run over and check it out. At last, I decided to do what I had often told myself I should do, and took that turn.
A road leads up the butte, but the steep grade is studded with sharp lava rocks, and rather than chewing up my vehicle’s tires, I opted for an easy climb to the summit. I followed the road on foot about halfway across the east side of the butte, impressed with the expanse of open country between myself and the distant mountains of the Boise Front. A rugged shortcut uphill beckoned. After a brief climb, the butte rounded onto a large flat area used for parking and, I’m sure, partying. At the southwest corner of this area, a lava outcropping rose to a point topped by a concrete platform with guardrails of pipe.
This butte may be only a hundred and twenty-five feet above the desert floor, but the flatness of the surrounding countryside makes for stunning vistas. Whether the Boise Front to the north, the Owyhee Mountains to the south, Oregon’s Mahogany Mountains to the west or the endless desert to the east, the land defines the concept of big sky. My whole life, I have explored its canyons and other features, and the grandeur of its open space. Continue reading
We arrived at The College of Idaho in Caldwell on a chilly Saturday morning. Our mission: the Natural History Museum.
Our leader Teresa Hafen and I, her assistant, ushered our group of ten year-old Cub Scouts down concrete stairs to a metal door leading into the basement. As we entered a huge warehouse of archived items, excitement rose in the voices of the boys—especially Tyler, who is always a tad more enthusiastic then the others. They all proceeded to get louder and louder until we explained the rules, which included not touching anything and being respectful, particularly to our guides, who were volunteers. We met Nathan Carpenter, who immediately engaged the boys in a display of blowfish. He invited us to look around, and we looked, but I kept one eye on Tyler. Continue reading
Graveyards are traditionally permanent, inviolate resting places deserving of community care. For various reasons, however, some cemeteries have needed to be exhumed and transferred to new land. In 1888, Lewiston found itself in just such a predicament as the town began to stress its original boundaries along the Snake and Clearwater Rivers, the spring floods of which repeatedly destroyed property and hindered business growth.
Lewiston’s cemetery was the stereotypical “Boot Hill,” a plateau above the town where interments had been performed since the early 1860s. Regrettably, the eight-acre site was increasingly perceived as an impediment to civic “progress,” its proximity to the future neighborhood of the town’s wealthiest families considered undesirable. The cemetery’s disturbing lack of upkeep and state of disrepair aggravated the situation. Cows roamed freely among the graves, trampling wooden and stone markers. The stately, whitewashed fencing installed at great expense in 1879 was now drab, decayed, and falling down. The cemetery had become an eyesore, not what one would expect of an emerging shipping center and the site of the Pacific Northwest’s first telephone service.
After several proposals were debated and discarded by the city fathers, a new forty-acre site was selected in an area deemed to be distant enough from the town’s center to pose few problems for city developers. In December 1888, the city council officially banned any further burials in the old cemetery, and in the spring exhumations began. The platting records were woefully inadequate. Indeed, no map of the original cemetery has ever surfaced. By May 1893, the city council was obligated to “devise ways and take necessary steps” for removing the remaining graves and quickly passed an exhumation ordinance, contracting with Dudley Gilman “for the removal of the dead from the old city cemetery.” His costs were to be passed on to the surviving family members. Since he was related to a popular former mayor, no one openly questioned Gilman when it came time to pay his bill—$752.30 for no more than a few days’ work. Later that year, he was authorized to plow and harrow the grounds, taking the more than seventeen hundred feet of cemetery fencing as payment.
However, apparently the city council was not satisfied that every body had been removed. A brief notation in the city council minutes of the May 6, 1895, proclaimed: “It appearing to the satisfaction of the Council that certain persons were buried upon lands owned by the City…the Marshal was ordered to notify the interested persons to remove such bodies at once to the new Cemetery of the City.” The “interested persons” were none other than long-time residents and influential Jewish businessmen Abraham Binnard and Robert Grostein, who had been resisting the exhumation ordinance for nearly two years. But more about that later.
That same year surveyors divided the old cemetery property into four lots for potential sale, but plans for a new hospital, church, and Masonic Temple came to nothing. By 1900 a major portion of the grounds had been dedicated for use as Lewiston’s first municipal park. In 1905 a new Carnegie Library opened, and the Idaho Supreme Court Library was erected. Trees were planted throughout the park. In 1911 a local women’s group spearheaded the construction of a large fountain—complete with a statue of Sacajawea—in time for a speech by President Howard Taft from the park’s band shell, the only time a sitting president has visited Lewiston. The site of the old cemetery had been transformed, its legacy obscured by the circuitous paths of community development.
Adding to the usual graveyard mystique, a persistent story circulated that a mass grave had been dug in the new cemetery (now known as Normal Hill Cemetery) when the unidentified remains from the old burial lots had been gathered and transferred to the out-of-the-way unmarked site. A current lot map shows most of an entire row with the penciled annotation “NR,” which has long been assumed to mean “no room” or “no record.” It would take a group of dedicated students and some space age technology to unmask a truth more interesting than anyone imagined.
As a consultant for gifted programs, and a cartographer for the Lewis-Clark Rediscovery Project, I decided this forgotten cemetery would be a perfect puzzle for my class of seventh-grade students at Jenifer Junior High School. Using geographic information systems (GIS) with the popular software ArcView, we set out to uncover the truth behind the mass-grave rumor. Continue reading
