This delightful book is based on letters written by the author’s grandmother, Dorothy Woodruff. They tell of the year she and her friend Rosamond Underwood spent teaching school in Elkhead, Colorado, a remote settlement in the Rocky Mountains.
Graduates of Smith college, class of 1906, they took the grand tour of Europe, and “then like other girls of their background they were expected to return home to marry, and marry well.” Bored, they jumped at a chance to travel West to teach school. They had no teaching experience, especially in “Domestic Science,” as they had grown up where maids and cooks managed that.
The school that hired them was the inspiration of Ferry Carpenter, a young homesteader, who had worked with his neighbors to build a consolidated school house in the Elkland mountain range. He and his cowboy friends, as young girls were scarce out there, were hoping for teachers whom they would enjoy taking to neighborhood dances, as well as teachers who could get book learning into their younger brothers and sisters’ heads.
Ferry himself was a graduate of Princeton, and Harvard law school. He wrote to a friend back East: “If [you] have any doubt about their having the necessary gimp in them to handle this job why let them drop right now.”
The rest of the book tells of the many tests of Dorothy and Rose’s gimp, including; riding to school and back, even in blizzards, handling the thirty or more pupils of many differing skills and backgrounds, and visiting with their parents in sod huts of log cabins.
This book made me remember how courageous, and ingenious our citizens were back then, and gives hope that we are still undaunted.
[Published 2011]
Maria Wood says
Another in the “Grandmother Book” genre – sounds fascinating!