District #28 Pleasant View By: Jessica Lucero

Pleasant View was located approximately 7 miles south, and 3 miles west of Grinnell, Kansas. Pleasant View was established on May 24, 1887. (History and Heritage of Gove County Kansas) Stella Mather taught from 1899 to 1900 at Pleasant View. After she had graduated from the country school she went to, she taught her first year in her district. It was a one-room schoolhouse. Her salary of about $25.00 per month was used to support her family of 10 children! Stella Mather was a Gove Country Superintendent in 1904. She didn’t have any high school experience at the time but she attended high school while she was the superintendent in Gove. Jake Mather found the sod schoolhouse had been built with the donated labor at a cost of $18.75. Pleasant View was first a Sunday school called the “Cowboy Sunday School”. (History and Heritage of Gove County Kansas)

In 1909 the female teachers were paid $350.00 per year, and they worked at least seven to eight months. Male teachers were paid $900.00 per year. (Gove County Register of Deeds)

Pleasant View was a one-room schoolhouse that contained a very little amount of books in their “library”. Their “library” was just a simple bookshelf in the back of the room facing the desks; the number of books ranged from 63 to 89 books. (Gove County Register of Deeds)

In many of the years they never had very many kids, and the total amount of kids ranged from 5 to 22 kids in the entire schoolhouse. In 1909 they had 11 male students, and they had nine female students, only 19 total. This was all the students, 1^st grade through 8^th grade. The ages of the students varied from 5 years old to 22 years old.

Some of the subjects in the school varied. There was Orthography, Reading and Classics, Writing, Arithmetic, Geography, Language and Grammar, U.S. History, Kansas History, Physiology, Civics, Agriculture, and Drawing.

They would have at least three times to take a break from class. When they had those breaks, they went outside and would play games, such as Red Rover, Kick the Can, Annie Over, and when there would be a nice snow, they would play Fox and Geese. After about 62 years of the school, the school was disorganized June 10, 1949. It joined with North Hackberry #49. (Gove County Register of Deeds)

From Left: Ernie Walz, Alan Bemiss, Eugene Suter, Elmer Bemiss, Marvin Bemiss, and Marvin Homm. This was originally the “Cowboy Sunday School” or Schoen School. (Warriors Yearbook: 1980 files) Back to Home

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