On a January morning in 1908, a student named Elta Nelson smelled smoke on the second floor of Hooper’s brick schoolhouse. The alarm went up at 11:30. The building was cleared, and by the time the fire company arrived there was no hope of saving it. Men went in for the desks and books on the ground floor. Within an hour of the first alarm the school was gutted.

The loss came to about $15,000, against $8,000 of insurance. The cause was put down to a defective flue.

What followed was more revealing than the fire. Hooper spent the next six months arguing — in the newspaper, at the ballot box, and eventually through its doctors — not about whether to rebuild, but about where. The fight was over a hill.

The School on the Hill

The building that burned had been Hooper’s pride. Before it, the village had no school inside its limits at all; children walked to a schoolhouse west of town until the building was physically moved onto the village plot.

In 1881 the town put up a two-storey brick school on an elevated piece of ground overlooking the village, at a cost somewhere between $3,400 and $5,000 — the sources don’t agree. A.J. Andreas’s History of Nebraska recorded the result approvingly:

Hooper now has the finest school in the county. Also, they have a very fine teacher, Miss Lizzie McGuire to manage it. They are waiting for the bell to arrive for the schoolhouse.

By 1886 it graduated its first high school class: three girls, Helen Van Buren, Jennie Sutton and Julia Wagner. In 1892 an addition went on at $2,975. Photographs from the period show it standing almost alone at the top of the hill, no houses visible in any direction.

Then it burned.

Six Months of Argument

With the school gone, classes scattered across whatever rooms the town could find: the old Tillman hotel building, the Tillman brick store on Main Street, the Methodist Church, the Hartwig brick building, and the German Lutheran Church school building. The Methodist Church bell was rung to call the children in.

Meanwhile the town divided. Some wanted the new school back on the hill, arguing it stayed dry when the bottom ground did not. Others wanted it on the flat, citing the danger of the railroad crossing and, plainly, the exertion of climbing the hill twice a day.

On 25 February the local paper printed a letter from a former student, Dora Tunberg Burleigh, writing from outside the town in favour of the hill. Her argument has to be read in full to be believed:

Let us not coddle young girls and allow them to grow into pale sickly women who are not fit for the duties and burdens life brings to them. Urge them to wear loose clothing and when they walk up that hill let them take long deep breaths that expand their waist and every step will do them good. This will make them the healthy, well developed girls that will make the strong, healthy mothers of tomorrow.

Two days later, on 27 February, the town voted on bonds of $21,000 to build the new school. The bonds carried, 93 to 37. And still, as the paper noted, both sides were undecided where to put the building.

The Doctors Fall Out

By the end of March the argument had escalated to the point that it drew in the medical profession of two towns. A Fremont paper reported it on 31 March 1908 with visible enjoyment:

The big question whether hill climbing is beneficial for the children is one of which is causing locking of horns of the Hooper and Fremont doctors. The Hooper doctors are against the building of the school on the hill and the Fremont doctors think it would be healthy for children.

The Hooper doctors demanded a retraction. The Fremont doctors refused, then wrote to say they were not interested in the controversy and that their opinions had been strictly professional — which is a way of losing an argument while insisting you were never in one.

It is worth pausing on what this was really about. A town of a few hundred people had spent two months publicly disputing the physiology of a walk to school, and had pulled in the doctors of a larger neighbouring town to referee. Underneath the question of children’s lungs was a question about what kind of place Hooper meant to be, and who got to decide.

The Vote

It was settled on a Monday at the beginning of July, at the annual school district meeting.

The paper reported that more than usual interest was taken that year, because of the necessity of choosing a site. 420 votes were cast: 125 for the hill, 295 for the park. The park site won by better than two to one.

For comparison, the bond vote in February had drawn 130 voters. The site vote drew 420 — more than three times as many.

The account gives one reason for the jump, almost in passing: “The interest taken by the women and the members which turned out to vote on their choice of sites was an unusual event.”

That sentence deserves more attention than it has ever been given. In 1908, twelve years before the Nineteenth Amendment, women turned out in Hooper in numbers large enough that the newspaper remarked on it, and they did so over a school. Exactly what the franchise was in a Nebraska school district election at that date, and how many of those 420 votes were cast by women, is not something the centennial history establishes. It is one of the more interesting unanswered questions in this whole account, and we would like to answer it.

What the record does show is relief. After the vote, the paper observed that in the months past there had been so many questions and arguments about the school site that it had split the community, and that everyone was glad to have it chosen.

The same meeting elected John Savers and Carl Kroeger as directors, gave the board full power to adopt plans, and voted to employ a music teacher for the following year.

Four Bids and a Shrug

Bids were opened at the school board meeting on a Monday night in August. Four came in:

  • P.J. Creedom and Son, Omaha — $21,700
  • F.H. Woerth, Scribner — $23,220
  • A.E. Edwards, Tilden — $19,950
  • Woodward and Blaser, Omaha — $19,695

The centennial history records the outcome in five words that carry a century of small-town editorial tone: “Of course, the last firm got the contract.”

Woodward and Blaser were the low bidders by $255.

A Note on the Date

Hooper cannot quite agree on when its school burned.

The written account in the centennial history gives 28 January 1908. But the caption under the photograph on the facing page says the big fire was on 23 January 1908 — and the photograph itself, a postcard mailed to a Miss Lydia Rabe in Denver for one cent, is captioned in the photographer’s own hand: JAN 23-08 H.S. Fire.

A caption written on the day, by the man holding the camera, is ordinarily better evidence than a recollection typed up sixty-eight years later. We are inclined to 23 January. But the town’s own centennial book prints both, a page apart, without noticing, and until someone checks the newspaper for that week we are not going to pretend the matter is closed.

Which is a good example of why this blog cites its sources.

What Became of It

The school went up on the park site. The hill kept its name and lost its building.

If you have photographs of either school — the 1881 building on the hill, or the one that replaced it — or if anyone in your family kept papers from the 1908 argument, we would like to see them. And if you can settle the date of the fire, or find out how many of those 420 votes were cast by women, you will have added something genuinely new to Hooper’s written history.