1872 ……….RULES FOR TEACHERS.

When the Anderson household was full of children with NO school house for them in La Junta, Colorado, what do you do?  Simple, you build a log cabin school for your children.  Providing for this building was no challenge for our Great Grandfather Albert Anderson and his son William.  They were used to building log cabin homes when they lived in Texas, near the military forts.

 Top picture of the original La Junta school built by Albert Anderson and son.  Bottom picture is a replica of the school built for the La Junta, Colorado museum.

 Actually, building the school was the easy part, hiring a teacher was the hard part!

Most of the teachers in the late 1800’s were un-married women.  If they got married they could no longer teach, they were told “not to keep company of men”.  The average salary for women $25.99 a month and men $31.52.  The following is taken from the Colorado publication, UP THE HEMLINE, which lists the rules for teaching in 1872.

1. Teachers each day will fill lamps, clean chimneys.
2. Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day’s session.
3. Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nibs to the individual taste of the pupils.
4. Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly.
5. After ten hours in school, the teachers may spend the remaining time reading the bible or other good books.
6. Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.
7. Each teacher should lay aside from each pay a goodly sum of his earnings for his benefit during his declining years, so that he will not become a burden on society.
8. Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls or gets shaved in a barber shop,  will give good reason to suspect his worth, intention, integrity and honesty.
9. The teacher who performs his labor faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of twenty-five cents per week in his pay, providing the Board of Education approves.

 If the above rules were not enough to discourage potential teachers, they would be told to arrive at the school early to start a fire in the pot belly stove and prepare a hot meat for the students.   Women were not under any circumstances dye their hair and their dresses must not be any shorter than 2 inches above their ankles.

 WHERE WAS THE COLORADO TEACHERS UNION IN 1872?