LOOKING BACK is a Leader online feature that highlights historic photos. Readers are invited to submit their historic Jefferson County photos for online publication.
Students and visitors to Northwest High School in Cedar Hill may wonder about the name of a road that runs along the school, Local Hillsboro Road.
The name doesn't refer to a street that just serves the Hillsboro area; after all, it runs from Hwy. 30 to Hillsboro House Springs Road west of Hillsboro.
Like many road names in Jefferson County, this one is self-explanatory. Hillsboro House Springs Road ran between those two towns. Likewise, Local Hillsboro Road was a path between Hillsboro and a place called, well, Local.
Now part of the Cedar Hill ZIP code, Local centered around a school, the Local School District No. 18, which, before all the one-room schoolhouses in Jefferson County were organized into a countywide numbering system, began its life as No. 4 of School Township 14.
The one-room school sat next to a Baptist church cemetery near Local Hillsboro and Cedar Hill roads, across from the Northwest High School campus.
According to the book, "Country Schools: Jefferson County, Missouri 1806-1952" by Della Lang, Local School's proximity to the cemetery caused some problems.
"One former student remembered that the location of the schoolhouse often caused class disruptions. She said it wasn't easy to concentrate on arithmetic problems when a casket was being lowered into a grave next door. The teacher usually allowed the students to 'hang out the windows' until the burial was over."
The cemetery is still there, but the school has long since disappeared. All that's left of Local School, Lang notes, are a few old photographs (one of which appears here), a record book and memories.
The record book, Lang said, indicates that Grace Brackmann earned $50 a month to teach grades 1-8 in 1916; that may not have been enough, as she was replaced by Edward Bruns in 1917.
By 1936, the teacher salary was $73 per month and rising; Janice Buxton was paid $80 in 1940. In 1943, she received a raise to $100 per month.
Board minutes from 1928 indicated that the school bought six cords of wood from Vernon Schubel at $8 a cord to heat the building that winter.
The minutes also indicate that Fern Whipple spoke to the board on Oct. 7, 1928, to discuss plans to make Local "a first-class school" but that the board said it would do the best it could with the money it had. "Teacher ordered to get all necessary books and clerk ordered to get oil stove for serving hot lunch," the minutes show.
In April 1930, the board voted to wire the schoolhouse for electricity.
That's not necessarily an indication that the school board was progressive, however. Several times, the minutes indicate, residents petitioned the board to expand the school year to nine months (rural schools in that era met for seven or eight months). Lack of money was cited as a reason to keep the status quo..
In April 1944, Local School merged with the nearby Cedar Hill School, and with the combined revenue from the two schools, residents promoting a longer school year got their wish.
Five years later, the Cedar Hill District was absorbed into the newly formed Northwest R-1 School District.
Send submissions to LOOKING BACK to nvrweakly@aol.com or bring or mail them to the Leader office, 503 N. Second St., Festus (P.O. Box 159, 63028). Please include your name, phone number, a brief description of what's in the photo and tell us how you came by it. Please also include when it was taken, where and by whom (if known). A new LOOKING BACK photo will be posted each week.
