CHAPTER VI
INTELLECTUAL AND RELIGIOUS FORCES OF WALLA WALLA COUNTY; EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS OF WALLA WALLA
While the eastern parts of the United States and pre-eminently New England, above all the State of Massachusetts, have assumed, and to considerable degree justly, that they hold priority in education, yet the people of the Far-West may rightfully claim that within the past dozen or twenty years they have made such gains in educational processes and results as to place them in the front rank. The report of the Russell Sage Foundation a few years ago that for all 'round efficiency the schools of Washington State were entitled to first place in the United States, was not surprising, though gratifying to those familiar with the extraordinary growth in equipment and teaching force during the last decade. As is well known, several western and Pacific Coast states outrun all others in freedom from illiteracy, having practically no permanent residents of proper age and normal faculties unable to read and write. It is one of the glories of American democracy, and in fact the logical consequence of self-government in this or in any country, that the craving for knowledge and power and advancement exists in the masses. Thus and thus only can democracy justify its existence. In the West, and perhaps even most intensely in the Pacific Coast states, the ambition to succeed, the spirit of personal initiative, the feelings of independence and equality, were the legitimate product of the pioneer era.
| Jefferson School | |
| Green Park School | Lincoln School |
| Washington School | Sharpstein School |
| SCHOOLS OF WALLA WALLA | |
The state builders, the offspring of the immigrant train, the homesteaders of the Walla Walla country, were, like other westerners, anxious to bequeath to their children better opportunities for education than they in their primitive surroundings could command. Hence they had hardly more than satisfied the fundamental necessities of location, shelter, and some means of income than they began to raise the question of schools. In the earliest numbers of the Washington Statesman the pioneer newspaper of the Inland Empire, beginning in 1861, we find the question of suitable school buildings raised. But that was not the beginning. It is interesting to recall that Doctor and Mrs. Whitman were constantly active in maintaining a school at Waiilatpu, not only as a missionary enterprise for the Indians, but, as time went on, for the children of the immigrants, who gradually formed a little group around the mission. Then after the long period of Indian wars and the establishment of the United States garrison in its present location, there was provision made in 1857 for teaching the children of the garrison together with a few stray children in the community. The teacher of that little group was Harry Freeman of the first dragoons, Troup E. The building used was on the garrison grounds. Among the children were several well known later in Walla Walla and the state, as James and Hugh McCool and their sister Maggie, afterwards Mrs. James Monaghan, mother of the gallant Lieutenant Monaghan, who lost his life heroically in the Samoan Islands and for whom a commemorative monument stands at the southern end of the Monroe Street bridge in Spokane. In that first little company of school children were Robert Smith, Mrs. Michael Kenny, and the Sickler girls, one of whom is now Mrs. Kyger. The first school within the limits of Walla Walla was conducted in 1861-2 by Mrs. A. J. Miner in a private house at about what would now be Alder and Palouse streets. Another pioneer teacher was J. H. Blewett.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS