BEULAH LAND SCHOOL

BEULAH LAND SCHOOL

Mona Hyer Waibel

All photos are from the personal collection of Mona Hyer Waibel.

Use of them for commercial purposes is prohibited without her permission

My grandmother taught at Beulah Land School in 1899. Lettie Pearl Thompson, 16 years old, was excited about her first teaching position.

Some of her students were to be in a ball game on Sunday afternoon, and the supportive young teacher decided she should be there to cheer them on to victory. Word went out about Lettie attending the ball game on the “Sabbath,” and a special meeting of the school board was held to discuss this improper act. Old man Amos Horner I, was a local preacher and also the chair of the board which, of course, was composed of all male members. After a lengthy meeting, Lettie was suspended.

Now Great-grandpa John Thompson had a great deal of influence in this community and also was well known throughout Linn County. John was vastly disturbed because of this unfair verdict to his oldest daughter, and set out to do what he could do to rectify the decision. He drove Lettie in a horse and buggy all the way into Albany. It took one day going and another day to return. But no matter, stubborn John Thompson knew he was right about this case. My great-grandfather protested the unfairness of this decision to the superintendent of Linn County Schools. Lettie was reinstated.

My grandmother fought for women’s rights all her 97 years. Perhaps that is why she was elected Sweet Home’s mayor in 1929.

In those early days, the families attending Beulah Land Schoolwere the Horners, Woods, Mayfields, Bigbees and many Gabriel children. Bob Gabriel, father of Keith, Gerry, Bob, Bill, Beverly and Barbara Gabriel, attended Beulah Land during my grandmother’s teaching years. The Bigbees, Lyle and Carson, became famous big league ball players from Sweet Home. This small school did have some very fine students.

Beulah Land School was also called Lower Pleasant Valley School. In 1935, Floyd and Audrey Bryant moved their four Hyer children, including me, to the Haywire ranch in beautiful Pleasant Valley, just past the Berlin Rd. intersection.

Pleasant Valley in Sweet Home; sounds almost like the neatest address this side of Heaven, doesn’t it? But there was nothing neat about a fairyland during the Great Depression. Times were difficult. In the fall of 1936, all four Hyer children joined the other students of Beulah Land School.

Our family had moved from Sweet Home to raise sheep. Many men were thinking how they could make a living in these poor times. It turned out to be a very poor choice, as all the sheep became ill, and one by one they died and left us penniless again.

But nevertheless we trudged off down the dirt road, called Pleasant Valley Road, to the one-room Beulah Land School. School buses then, we had not even heard of. There was one teacher for all eight grades, and sometimes the female teacher was smaller than many of the farm boys who attended in their overalls and the girls in cotton gingham dresses. The wooden school building was slightly heated by a hungry potbelly stove. You could sidle up to the wood stove and toast your backside on one side while the other side remained very cool. All students had a wooden desk with its own messy inkwell in which they dipped the metal tip of the wooden pen to write school papers. The little ones, like me, used a pencil tablet, of course. There were no school supplies. I remember we had one pair of scissors and the teacher had to furnish these. The same went for the one ball and bat we had to use at recess time; if the ball was lost, the game was over!

Our lunches were packed at home; mine usually was in a metal oatmeal bucket that I loved to turn around in the sunshine, and then pretend it was a real moving picture show. Lunches were usually plain homemade bread sliced thick with fresh churned butter sandwiches. If we were fortunate, Mother made oatmeal-raisin cookies for dessert.

During our lesson times, the older children helped the smaller children with what they did not comprehend. We were all taught to be patriotic and every morning we said the Pledge of Allegiance to our American flag. Then we all sang “Oregon, my Oregon”…

“Onward and upward ever–forward and on and on, my Oregon.”

I loved this daily ritual.

Most of the families I remember well from this school: the Gabriel family who were always our best friends; the Webers – Bill, Betty and Janice; Bill Sommers; Duane Galloway – who attended here because his mother taught at Upper Pleasant Valley school and it was not permitted that he attend where his mother taught; the Petrie children, and of course my three brothers Jim, Tom and Karel Hyer and me - little Ramona, who entered the first grade at Beulah Land.

The Weber families were famous for their blackcap berry fields that gave jobs to many people during harvest months, especially the local children. We earned a dime or two in those fields. We, of course, walked to the fields and back home again after a long day of picking these berries. I would rather pick these any time than the back-breaking job of picking strawberries.

My dad did a little farming while we lived on the Haywire Ranch, and plowing the fields was so interesting – up came treasures! The Kalapuya Indians, which had camped in the area, left behind wonderful mortars, pestles and even a peace pipe or two. I feel like there are still treasures left on that farm; we couldn’t have found them all.

Beulah Land School was the hub of our universe. Of course schools were the center of all social life in those days. Great Christmas and other holiday programs were held and everyone piled into this crowded school to watch the excited, frightened children do their parts. Hard candy was our only taste of candy for another year, and we thought it was really yummy. Picnics and games were planned for good weather and parents attended most of these festivities. Every student also looked forward to events at Sweet Home High School when we could go into town and take part in the May Day celebration with its May Pole dancing and the wonderful track meets that my brothers were so good at.

Small country schools did not have many luxuries, none that I can remember; and when the boys and girls needed to be weighed, the entire school’s population marched down the dusty road and through the fields to the genial bachelor Charlie Simons farm, to be weighed on his feed scales. This was our own “economy” field trip. There were no drinking fountain or soda machines of course, and when we needed to quench our thirst, we headed out to the school yard to pump a very cool drink from the well water deep in the hard ground. Recesses were outside if the weather permitted. Our school had an outhouse that we all took turns using; sometimes we used the fruit orchards. The fruit trees were well fertilized and the most productive in the valley.

Children were expected to attend school every day, even in horrific weather. Hail might be pelting them as they trudged to school, and they would be drenched by the good old Oregon rain. Sometimes it snowed and other days we walked an hour each way on frozen ground.

The soles of our shoes were replaced often, and our dad, Floyd Bryant, learned to repair our shoes. With all these children there were many hand-me-downs, but shoes were usually worn out.

There were not many vacation days from school, but when the farmers needed their children to remain home to help with the crops, students were allowed to stay away from studies. Depression years had their priorities: Crops and food on the table came before learning and not many were encouraged to finish high school. Hot summers were special and we all looked forward to a dip in the Santiam River at Bates Park near the McDowell Creek Bridge, or for a ride in a rowboat at Bill Sommers pond.

We Hyer kids had to invent our fun any way we could. The Billy goat gave us endless pleasure. I had a wagon that we hitched to “Billy” and it was simply glorious having this for a ride around our acreage. Our goat liked to run and feed with the cows. One day our dad came home with a new bull, and our Billy was unhappy. He ran under the bull and knocked him flat, then proudly went about his business fraternizing with his friends, the bossies in the pasture.

In time, though, we moved back into our 4 1/2 acres in Sweet Home, and gave up our Haywire Ranch. And we gave up Beulah Land School.

It is amazing that all four children received a fine education starting out like we did at Beulah Land School. Mostly my brothers left high school for the military before they completed school; but later they had that treasured diploma from Sweet Home High School. Most of us attended college; Jim received his Master’s Degree in Education; Tom owned G & H logging company; Karel supervised the police for the state of Oregon; and I was a director of community education for Linn Benton Community College. How we ended up was a far cry from that one-room schoolhouse.

My old schoolhouse smelled of pencil shavings, jars of paste and ink wells that leaked. Our wooden desks were scarred from years of use, and the bare rough boards that we walked upon creaked and groaned from years of children, laughter and endless dreams. Classes ended there in 1954. The Beulah Land School building no longer stands, but many good memories remain.

From Kathleen Neal Johnson:

At Beulah Land classes started each fall in late August (after the haying was done), and ended the first of May (before strawberry picking). I began first grade in 1951. The teacher rang a hand-held bell that clanged the start of each day. There was a shed with rings to swing on and other pieces of equipment to play on during the rainy season. There was one restriction, however; you had to be tall enough to catch the rings.

Our desks were the traditional wooden seat joined by wrought iron braces and legs. We had an opening for an ink well but were not allowed to use ink in the wells until 5^th grade. (That saved a lot of girls’ pigtails, I’m sure!)

The students put on a program of skits and singing for their parents’ enjoyment each Christmas. One winter day, during a freeze, one of the boys stuck his tongue on the metal pump located outside the main school building, and Mrs. Patch had to pour cold water simultaneously on the tongue and pump to free the hapless victim.

The little one-room school building nestled in a grove of trees about one-quarter to a half-mile from my parents’ home at 28607 Pleasant Valley Road. This building was built in 1912, and when the old school house and out-buildings went up for auction, my dad, Don Neal, bought them for $1.

For the academic year of 1954/55 the students at Beulah Land were transferred to Sunnyside School, a 45-minute bus ride away. The following year we were transferred to the Foster School district. Some of the students took their first music lessons at Foster. We had found a home.