Eva McCrary with college students contained in the Little Blue School
The Little Blue School House in Ranchester provides college students a have a look at what it was prefer to go to high school in the early days of Sheridan County.
According to the guide, “The Little Blue School,” written by Frances Stall Husdale and Audrey M. Kleinsasser, with Dorothy Gibb and illustrated by Ed Murphy, the college was constructed in 1902. The guide is on the market on the Tongue River Branch Library.
Families residing on the higher a part of Five Mile Flat had been a ways from the Ohlman School, and it was an extended experience for the children on horseback. The households determined to constructed a college nearer to the place they lived.
The college operated till 1949. In 1988, the Little Blue School, though not used, didn’t collapse right into a pile of dusty boards, and it was one in every of solely two or three one-room college in Sheridan County that was nonetheless standing.
Several individuals in the Parkman-Dayton-Ranchester space took an interest in shifting the college and restoring it in the interval. The college was moved and arrange on the grounds of the Tongue River Elementary college in Ranchester.

In 1990, the restored Little Blue School was devoted as an official Wyoming Centennial Project. It was offered to the School District #1 School Board and is acknowledged as an emblem of residing historical past serving to protect the legacy of the one-room rural colleges which performed a component in Wyoming’s historical past and reveals the dedication early Wyoming settlers needed to educating their kids.

Today, the Little Blue School sits close to the Ranchester Community Center. One day every spring second grade lecturers Eva McCrary and Andrea Sears, convey their college students from Tongue River Elementary School to carry courses in the previous schoolhouse. “We let them walk here and tell them about how they would have had to walk or ride a horse to school.” McCrary mentioned. “We talk about the history of the school as well.”
She added that the youngsters like it, it’s a area journey they at all times keep in mind. She mentioned they actually have a dunce cap that the youngsters generally put on and sit in the nook, which was a punishment for unruly college students in the 1900s.
The college students pack a lunch and keep a lot of the day. Mike Board, a retired Physical Education instructor who taught at Tongue River Elementary, teaches them quaint PE video games.

He talked about a few of the video games that college students used to play. “We will do some potato sack relays, Annie, Annie Over which is a tag game that involves throwing the ball over the Little Blue School; London Bridge, Kick the Can, and other games.”

Inside of the college is about up like it could have been in 1902. There is a chalk board, previous readers, a wooden range for warmth, footage of Washington and Lincoln, a piano, and a water jug, tin cups, and every part the scholars would want to be taught in the early days of Sheridan County.
Although McCrary solely introduced the second-grade class, a lot of the one-room colleges had college students from first grade by means of eighth grade, with one instructor for all of the grades, and the older college students serving to the youthful ones. In the one-room Slack School close to Parkman, one instructor has 5 college students, from kindergarten by means of fourth grade.
The Little Blue School in Ranchester, a glance again in time and letting college students expertise how their grandparents could have discovered and what video games they could have performed in the one-room colleges in Wyoming.