As the homesteaders filled the townships, they built schools — thousands of small, plain, one-room schoolhouses set on the section lines within a child's walking distance of the surrounding farms. In each, a single teacher, often barely older than the eldest pupils, taught all eight grades at once, hearing recitations from the youngest to the oldest across the course of a day.

All Eight Grades in One Room

The schoolhouse was more than a school. It was the neighborhood's gathering place — the site of the Christmas program, the box social, the community meeting, the election. The teacher, frequently a young woman boarding with a local family, held a position of real standing in the settlement, and the school year bent around the demands of planting and harvest.

From the almanac's reckoning:

• One teacher taught all eight grades in the prairie schoolhouses.
• The schoolhouse doubled as the neighborhood's gathering place.
• Consolidation and the automobile eventually closed nearly all of them.

Consolidation and the automobile eventually closed nearly all of them, and the little schoolhouses stand empty on the prairie today, or have vanished entirely. The almanac remembers them as the seedbed of the plains — where a scattered people schooled its children and knit itself together.