At 11:30 on a Tuesday morning in January 1908, a fire alarm sounded while classes were in progress at Hooper’s brick schoolhouse. The January 30 Hooper Sentinel reported that a teacher on the second floor had smelled smoke. Teachers marched the children out in order. By the time the fire company arrived, the upper part of the building was burning, and attention turned to rescuing desks and books.[8]
Within an hour, the interior was gutted. The report put the property loss at about $15,000, with $8,000 of insurance, and suspected a defective flue. Remaining brick walls began falling inward; the town board declared them unsafe and ordered demolition that afternoon.[8]
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.
The building’s beginnings are less certain than its fate. Hooper’s centennial book dates the brick school to 1881. Andreas’s state history, published in 1882, says it was built in 1880 and describes two rooms on elevated ground overlooking the village, with about 70 pupils taught by P. H. Musgrave and Agnes McDonald. The 1908 fire report gives a still earlier date, 1876, for the main building. Those dates remain in conflict; none should quietly replace the others.[1][8][9]
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. A photograph reproduced in the centennial book shows it standing prominently on the hill. The book’s description of the school and its setting supplies the background for the dispute that followed.[1]
Then it burned.
Six Months of Argument
The school board met that afternoon and evening and planned to reopen classes the following Monday. Its temporary rooms were the old Tillman hotel building, the Tillman brick store on Main Street, the Methodist Church classroom, the Hartung brick building and the German Lutheran Church school. The Methodist bell would serve as the school bell. These were arrangements announced by the Sentinel after the fire.[8]
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.
The centennial history reproduces a letter under a February 25, 1908 newspaper date from a former student, Dora Tunberg Burleigh, writing from outside the town in favour of the hill. The excerpt reveals how supporters connected the climb with children’s health:[2]
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.
A separate item dated February 27 reported that a Monday election had approved $21,000 in bonds, 93 votes to 37. February 27 is the report’s date, rather than the stated day of voting. The site question remained unsettled.[3]
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. The centennial book reproduces a March 31, 1908 Fremont newspaper account:[4]
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.
According to that account, the Hooper doctors sought a retraction. The Fremont doctors declined, then wrote that they were not interested in the local controversy and had given professional opinions.[4]
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
A Hooper newspaper item dated July 2, 1908, and reproduced in the centennial book describes a Monday site vote followed by the annual school district meeting.[5]
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 a brief sentence: “Of course, the last firm got the contract.”
Woodward and Blaser were the low bidders by $255.[6]
What the original report changes
The January 30, 1908 Sentinel places the fire at 11:30 on Tuesday, which was January 28. That supports the date in the centennial book’s written narrative. A fire postcard reproduced on the next page, however, carries a January 23 inscription, and the book repeats that date in its caption. The newly checked contemporary newspaper provides stronger support for January 28, while the conflicting postcard inscription remains part of the record.[8][1]
The accounts also differ over who first noticed the smoke: the original newspaper says a teacher, while the 1976 history names student Elta Nelson. We cannot establish the student identification from the newspaper. Both versions agree that the children got out and that desks and books were recovered before the building was lost.[8][1]
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 hilltop building, or the one that replaced it — or if anyone in your family kept papers from the 1908 argument, we would like to see them. Original school-board minutes could help explain the remaining building-date conflicts and identify how many of the 420 site votes were cast by women.