Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

October 17, 2021: The chimney of the Beaconsfield school building is visible at a distance. It’s about all that’s readily visible up close, too, because the deteriorating building is hidden in a grove of trees.

In a follow-up to this post from September, here’s even MORE about Ringgold County schools you never knew and didn’t know how to ask, via the Mount Ayr Record-News:

• A vote to form Grand Valley passed in August 1957 that included not only Grand River and Kellerton, but also Beaconsfield and Ellston. The latter two towns voted against joining the district. (8/22/57)
• However, before the district officially took effect, Beaconsfield and Ellston were taken out. “An important question at issue was the fact that the proceeding for the formation of the Grand Valley Community School District was commenced under one law and concluded under another.” (3/27/58) Beaconsfield graduated its last class in 1958.
  • But not before sending a girls’ basketball team to state in 1956, losing to New Sharon (3/1/56).
• Grand Valley kept high schools in both Grand River and Kellerton for two years before going with the latter (7/23/59).
• The first Mount Ayr Community School District — or, as they’d say across the Missouri state line, Mount Ayr R-1 — formed in 1958 (8/7/58). This district included Benton, Delphos, Maloy, and Redding.
• Mount Ayr R-2, adding Beaconsfield and Ellston, followed the next year (3/26/59). That, plus the formation of East Union to the north, put Tingley in a pinch, and its high school shut down in 1959 (5/7/59).
  • But not before sending a girls’ basketball team to state in 1952, 1954, and 1957.
• Mount Ayr R-3 only added Tingley, but it was enough to create the second-largest district in the state behind Eastern Allamakee (2/11/60).
  • Or, it would have, if both the Davis County and Western Dubuque reorganizations hadn’t blown them out of the water four months later. (Diagonal Reporter, 6/16/60; Cascade Pioneer-Advertiser, 6/16/60)
• Beaconsfield’s school closed in 1961; the IAGenWeb page is a year off. Delphos’ school closed at the same time (3/16/61).
• Although Mount Ayr did not have a vote in either, dissolutions of both Grand Valley and Clearfield added significant areas, so you could think of them as R-4 and R-5.
• Through all of that, no one considered a rename to Ringgold County Community School District.

The Southeast Valley school district, which will become official in mid-2023, can trace its history to 1914.

One of the first experiments in school consolidation, to be tried in this part of Iowa, will be at the town of Lanyon, just north of Paton township in Webster county. By unanimous petition of the patrons of the district No. 1, in Paton township, known as the Gust Burgh school, that district will be added to Lanyon and the same will be voted on by the patrons of the consolidated district within a short time.
— Jefferson Bee, June 17, 1914

Harcourt, just to the north, consolidated weeks after Lanyon, and/but the two communities would not be unified school-wise until Southeast Valley’s whole-grade sharing began in 2014. A 10-room, 2-story, $18,000 Lanyon Consolidated School building was dedicated May 1, 1917 (Gowrie News, 5/10/17). The structure would exist until the early 2000s. Multiple other towns in the area would form consolidated districts in 1919 and 1920.

The journey from Lanyon to Southeast Valley is long and big — as in, two-thirds the size of Rhode Island big. To tell that story, we need a family tree, or since I started work on this in March, a bracket with a couple round-robins and “pigtails”.

(I am extremely my parents’ child.)

As the family tree shows, there are a lot of former districts involved. The map below covers the top half only, the Prairie Valley district. The Southeast Webster-Grand district is east of PV, and not drawn in. (I hope the district differentiation is clear; I know it’s a lot of lines.)

At the bottom of the map is Lanyon, with the four-square-mile square in Greene County that was Paton No. 1 school to its south.

Through the Jefferson Bee, Jefferson Herald, the Globe Free Press/Paton Patriot/Rippey News and other sources, here is all I know about the district’s history.

• • Farnhamville, Rinard, and Somers merged into Cedar Valley in 1955 (JB, 11/23/54). That’s about the western third of the future PV district. The name is related to Cedar Township in Calhoun County and Cedar Creek, which flows into the Raccoon River northeast of Ralston. Cedar Valley bordered still-independent Knierim on two sides, but Kneirim eventually became part of Manson-Northwest Webster.
  • Among the Cedar Valley school board’s actions in its first month of existence: A 3-2 vote to close the building at Rinard (1950 pop. 115; 2020 pop. 38). This did not go over well. A lawsuit was filed claiming the district was illegally formed. The board reversed its decision and turned Rinard into the junior high (JH, 7/21/55, 9/1/55; JB, 9/27/55).
  • Farnhamville’s high school closed the year after Cedar Valley was formed (JH, 4/5/56).
  • Boxholm and Pilot Mound merged to form Grand in 1958 (Ames Tribune, 4/12/58 — two paragraphs but it’s all I need)
  • Lanyon, an unincorporated village 3 miles south of Harcourt, merged with Gowrie in 1959 to form a district called Prairie-View, sometimes written with a hyphen, sometimes not. Lanyon’s school lasted three years as PV’s junior high. It was not torn down until 2002-04 (aerial photos).
  • Burnside, Lehigh, and Harcourt consolidated as Central Webster in 1960 (Des Moines Tribune, 3/23/60). A fraction of the Harcourt district went to Gowrie (GFPPPRN, 5/26/60).
  • Prairie-View merged with Callender and Moorland in 1962 to form a district just called “Prairie” (GFPPPRN, 4/26/62).
  • Cedar Valley kept all three schools open until it opened a new complex at the intersection of D46 and P21, a few miles away from each town. It then held everything-must-go auctions at the old schools (GFPPPRN, 10/25/79), which were torn down by May 1983 (aerial photos).
    • By all rights, that 1979 site, now a K-4 school for Southeast Valley, should be attributed to Somers, not Farnhamville. (See, for example, this Fort Dodge Messenger brief.) Somers is the nearest incorporated community and the school is technically in Somers’ 50586 ZIP code.
  • There was a potential of Paton becoming part of the Prairie district (GFPPPRN, 1/18/62). Paton and Moorland were effectively on the clock because their high schools would lose state aid in 1962-63.
  • But by that spring, Paton was leaning toward Churdan. If consolidation did not get finalized by July 1, Paton would have to “tuition out” its high school students to Churdan (JB, 4/10/62). Long story short, it didn’t, and the Greene County Board of Education got excoriated by a district judge in a ruling printed in full in the Lohrville Enterprise and Farnhamville Index (4/11/63). The Paton-Churdan district took effect in 1964 (JB, 7/9/63).
  • The Pilot Mound school definitely closed in 1985 (Des Moines Register, 7/26/85).
  • I don’t have a closure year for either Harcourt or Moorland, but both had their original school buildings demolished between 1972 and 1983 (aerial photos). Lehigh’s school was also torn down in the 1970s.
  • Unrelated to all that: On April 3, 1962, the Jefferson school board removed its ban on married women as teachers (JB, 4/3/62). The change was prompted not by any sense of equality, but because there was a short supply of teachers and the state had recently imposed a requirement that elementary teachers have bachelor’s degrees.
  • In 2023, Southeast Valley will include 11 incorporated communities: Boxholm, Callender, Dayton, Farnhamville, Gowrie, Harcourt, Lehigh, Moorland, Pilot Mound, Rinard, and Somers; and two unincorporated communities, Burnside (where the middle school is) and Lanyon. Only Dayton and Gowrie have a population above 400.

The Prairie Valley and Southeast Webster-Grand school districts started whole-grade sharing as Southeast Valley in 2014. Almost a decade later they will be officially consolidated. Although the vote was March 1, the merger won’t go into effect until 2023, based on the current rule that reorganizations take effect July 1 of the calendar year following the vote.

The Fort Dodge Messenger has reported — twice — that Southeast Valley will be the second-largest school district in the state in area, behind Western Dubuque. This would have been correct a few years ago, but not anymore. The consolidation of Van Buren and Harmony in 2019 created the largest one-high-school single district. In addition, if Algona and Lu Verne merge as expected, that district will be ahead of Southeast Valley.

In 2021-22, pre-consolidation, Southeast Valley is the sixth-largest one-high-school area in the state. No new two-way whole-grade-sharing arrangements have been enacted since 2016. (Clay Central-Everly is the only district to have given up its high school since then.*)

Much more Southeast Valley history is coming Friday.

*Learned while writing this blog post: CCE only had one year of sending students in grades 7-12 to multiple schools. Then in 2020 it exclusively set one-way sharing with Spencer (story: KICD), reportedly because the state only allows one partner school. That surprises me, given that Andrew currently splits its students in grades 9-12 between Maquoketa and Bellevue.

*Learned while writing the previous note: Andrew is giving up its junior high students this fall, officially tuitioning to Bellevue but also having Maquoketa as a partner. (story: Bellevue Herald-Leader) That would explain things.