North Dakota: A Guide to the Northern Prairie State

by Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of North Dakota

The first school in North Dakota, at Pembina, had an enrollment of 60 children, white and half-breed, and courses in English were supplemented by lessons in planting small grains, both intended for the enlightenment of the "savage" Chippewa. The school was conducted until 1823, when, after the determination of the international boundary, many of the Selkirkers moved north to Canada, thus breaking up the colony. The missionaries were withdrawn, and the school and chapel remained closed for a quarter century. When Father George Belcourt came to the region in 1848, he reopened the Pembina Mission and founded another at St. Joseph in the Pembina Mountains. A school conducted at St. Joseph by the Sisters of the Propagation of the Faith received financial aid from the Federal Government, the first Federal support given to education in this State.

In the early settlements of the State, a mother would often gather the children of the neighborhood in her home for instruction, and itinerant teachers occasionally held classes in the tent cities which sprang up in the wake of the railroad. As the communities grew, residents cooperated in hiring teachers and building schools. The railroad companies assisted by shipping lumber free for schools. Between 1853 and the attainment of statehood in 1889, 1,362 schools were opened, many of them in country communities, taught by men or women who had come West to homestead. A teacher's report on one such school, sent to the superintendent of the Griggs County schools in 1886, recorded that he had taught a 62-day term, with 15 pupils enrolled and daily average attendance of 7 7/31; that his salary was $35 a month; and that the school building and grounds were in good condition, the former containing a "Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, New 8-Inch Terrestrial Globe, New Forms and Solids for object Teaching and Two Slate black boards."

By 1883 two institutions of higher education had been founded in the northern half of Dakota Territory. Jamestown College, the first school in the State to offer a normal course, had been established by the Presbyterian Church, and three months later the Territorial assembly voted to found a University of North Dakota at Grand Forks. Originally a liberal arts college, this institution extended its curriculum until, in 1889, it included a law school, a college of mechanical engineering, and a school of mines. In its first year the university had an enrollment of 79; during 1936, 2,555 attended classes or took correspondence work in its six colleges.

Several private colleges were opened prior to 1889, and the Enabling Act of that year provided for the establishment of an agricultural college and normal schools. Like the other private institutions, Jamestown College was forced to close its doors during the financial panic of 1893. Reopened in 1909, it is now the only endowed liberal arts college in the State. The effects of the 1893 depression on the university and normal schools were accentuated by the vetoing of the appropriations for a two-year period. Weathering this crisis, the State colleges and university reached an enrollment of 2,000 in 1904, and by 1936 their total registration exceeded 10,000.

Notable in educational history was the affiliation in 1905 of the university and Wesley College, a Methodist school originally located at Wahpeton. Similar affiliations were later made among other colleges, including the North Dakota Agricultural College, where the Wesley College buildings are now used for an interdenominational school of religion.

To comply with the provision of the Enabling Act requiring establishment and maintenance of a public school system open to all children and free from sectarian control, the first legislature set up an education department administered by three branches—a State superintendent, county superintendents, and district boards. It also created a tuition fund from the proceeds of school lands, supplemented by poll taxes, school taxes levied by general law, and all fines for violation of State statutes. The money from these sources was made available to all schools in which the English language was taught.

The school lands to which the law referred were received by the State in accordance with the plan of the Federal act of 1785 granting each new State carved from the Ohio Territory section 16 of each township for public school support. For North and South Dakota, under the Enabling Act, this grant was doubled, giving the schools one-eighteenth of all land surveyed. Town site boomers and speculators in other States commonly took advantage of school land grants to buy property at prices far below the actual value; but in the Dakotas they were forestalled by the alert Territorial superintendent of schools, W. H. H. Beadle, who incorporated into the constitutions of both States the provision that school lands might not be sold at less than $10 an acre, and might be leased as hay or grazing lands but not for cultivation, and that the title of western coal lands included in the grant must always be retained by the State. Similarly guarded were 750,000 acres of land granted to other educational institutions. So successful was Beadle's plan that it has been adopted by almost every other State admitted to the Union since 1889.

At the State School of Science at Wahpeton, opened in 1903 as a trade school and junior college, two methods of industrial education have been originated, the Babcock plan and the North Dakota plan, both of which have attracted the attention of educators throughout the United States. The former provides for the establishment of three departments within the school—a trade school, a junior college, and a business school, each of which, by a plan of interaction, is made to serve the others. The North Dakota plan, evolved to solve the problem of providing industrial education in an agricultural State, concentrates all trades education in one school, with the exception of night courses offered at other points in the State under the supervision of the school of science.

A second junior college was established in 1925 at the school of forestry in Bottineau. North Dakota is now one of the 27 States which have junior colleges.