Freeman School Number One

The east side of the school, the portion jutting out is the cloakroom with the window Carrie watched her father ride away from.

South of Zahl in the far northwest corner of North Dakota sits a run down old one room school. There’s no paint left on the wood, the windows are broken out, and the foundation is collapsing into the basement. It looks like just another dilapidated building on the plains that no one remembers and will soon be gone. Except someone does remember this one, known as the Freeman School Number One. Carrie Young wrote a series of essays recounting her pioneer mother’s life as well as her own in the early days of North Dakota. Some of these essays were eventually collected into a book titled Nothing to do but Stay, published in 1991 by Laurel Press.

Carrie’s mom, Carrine Gafkjen, came to Williams County in the far northwest corner of North Dakota to homestead in 1904. In 1912 she married Sever Berg, another homesteader (and fellow Norwegian) in a neighboring township. They eventually moved permanently to Carrine’s land and built a large farm with a proper house, barn, chicken coop, pig barn, and any other outbuilding you’d expect to find in the early 20th Century on a farm. Despite being 34 years old Carrine had six children, Bernice (Barney), Florence, Norman, Gladys, Frances, and finally Carrie in 1923.

In 1933 Barney was hired to teach at the Freeman School, just two and a half miles west of the Berg farm, so she could board with her parents. While Carrie and Fran didn’t initially attend this school, but a different one east of their farm, as the winter got worse and worse it was decidedly easier to have everyone going to the same school rather than braving snow in opposite directions.

Carrie describes the school this way “[It was] the most desolate school in the township. Whoever built Freeman School…was either an incurable optimist or had never lived through a North Dakota winter; all six of its windows were on the west wall. Throughout the long winter months the harsh northwest winds blowing down from Canada caught and mercilessly battered them. The township couldn’t afford storm windows; icy air whistled through the corners, creating a draft that moved papers on our desks.”

The heating situation wasn’t much better: “Unlike the three other township schools - which had sensible heating stoves in the classroom - this building had been fancied up with a furnace in the basement. A warm air register about four feet square was built into the floor in the center of the room. Whenever pupils became too chilled at their desks, they would raise their hands and ask permission to stand on the register. On days the thermometer sank to twenty degrees below, the entire school population of fourteen jostled on it.”

The classroom withe the large heat register Carrie described, for which students would jostle into position over to try and warm up on frigid winter days.

Carrie’s father initially hauled the girls to school in an old truck, but as the snow got deeper he resorted to using two old draft horses, Nancy and Queen, and an old box sled to take them to school. The winter finally got so bad it was decided that the three girls would just live at the school until things began to thaw out, with their father bringing over supplies a few times a week. As Carrie recounts: “One brilliantly cold Sunday afternoon my father loaded some double-bed springs and a mattress into the box sled while we packed our suitcases and my mother assembled enough food to see us through from Monday to Friday. Then Nancy and Queen once more took us to the schoolhouse.

“Dusk was coming on when my father turned the horses around to go home. With my face pressed against the small cloakroom window I watched the sled until it disappeared over the first hill. I then had a moment of panic, as if we had been marooned on a snow-covered island in the middle of a frozen ocean.”

The basement and coal furnace

The girls spent the next five weeks living in that school, enduring multiple blizzards, howling wind, darkness, and ornery horses that liked to rub against the walls of the school. To pass the time they would play gin rummy. She spoke of herself and Barney being spooked at night in the school, wondering if the forty-mile-per-hour winds would blow the building down on top of them, but Fran always kept calm. The only exception was one morning when she discovered a dead mouse in the hem of her corduroy skirt.

Finally in April they were able to return home. Carrie writes, “As I looked out of the cloakroom window on a Friday afternoon the second week in April and saw my father charging through the melting snow in his truck to move us home, I thought I had never seen a more beautiful sight. When I walked into the house I thought I would never again see one so luxurious. That evening I sat on my mother’s lap in front of the coal range in the kitchen, and I promised myself that I would never leave home again.”

Amazingly the school is still standing, having outlived the Berg farmstead, of which today there is not a trace, the site is now occupied by a pipeline compressor station. The school is exactly as Carrie described it, with the six west facing windows, the small cloakroom, the register in the floor, and the coal furnace in the basement. While all of these country schools that still exist certainly have stories to tell, this one actually had someone to tell it, putting some real life into what otherwise is an unsteady building of weathered boards. And despite Carrie’s worries about the wind blowing it over, it’s proved to be a pretty resilient building!

Freeman School Number One with its six west-facing windows.