Authors:
Historic Era: Era 7: The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
Spring 2011 | Volume 61, Issue 1
Iowa School Tales
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
In these letters, we encounter 18-year-old Elizabeth “Bess” Corey, a plucky school teacher in rural Tennant, Iowa, at the turn of the 20th century. Her homespun epistles, redolent with frontier eloquence and rife with misspellings, speak of homesickness and the joys and challenges of teaching in a one-room schoolhouse. “Yes I’d give a ‘lick’ at my piece of candy to be home long enough to can 60 qts of pieplant,” she ends one note to her mother.
Her irrepressible optimism burns steadily and brightly, even as she writes about nearly freezing to death on her way home during a snowstorm. Her enthusiastic, gossipy letter writing gives us an unusual look into rural America at about the same time that the Wright brothers were introducing their world-shattering invention.
Bess makes the best of the limited opportunities facing a young rural woman then. The untimely death of her father in 1905 had left her and her siblings scrambling to keep the mortgage paid on their family’s southwestern Iowa farm. Brothers Fuller and Rob tended the crops and livestock while Bess sought a teaching degree, which she would soon win, although her own education had ended at the ninth grade. At that time, only about two in ten high school–age American youth attended school. She would become a competent teacher, although she wouldn’t earn her high school degree until 1927, more than two decades after she had begun teaching.
Bess’s treasure trove of letters came to Philip Gerber, a professor of English at the State University of New York’s College at Brockport in 1989 by way of Bess’s only surviving sibling, Paul Corey. The first cache of letters was published in Bachelor Bess: The Homesteading Letters of Elizabeth Corey, 1909–1919, edited by Philip L. Gerber (University of Iowa Press, 1990). When Gerber died in 2005, University of Iowa Press managing editor Charlotte M. Wright took over editing the second volume, An Iowa Schoolma’am: Letters of Elizabeth “Bess” Corey, 1904–1908, which will be released this spring, and from which the following letters were taken.
The following documents her first year of teaching, from her first encounter with the school through to her hosting of the year-end picnic with several other schools. At 21, Bess would stake her own claim to a South Dakota homestead, continue her teaching, and write many more letters home.
Bess is an authentic American voice.
—John F. Ross
September 10, 1905
Tennant, Iowa
Dear Ma and the rest,
My SchoolHouse is a dandy. it is not quite as large as the one at home. It had a new floor put in last spring and the entire inside including ceiling is wainscoated It has been painted inside and out as I had been told that it would be. It faces the west, has three windows on each side, no halls and it has an organ, globe, a number of good maps and all the oldest seats have been replaced with new ones.
The school yard is fenced with a board fence on three sides but open t’ward the road.