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Dane County Wisconsin |
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EDUCATION Primary and Secondary Education A highly detailed overview of the history of Wisconsin's primary and secondary schools is contained in the Primary Public Education and the Public Secondary Education study units of the CRMP's Education Theme section. Therefore, this history will not be repeated here except as they amplify the history of the surveyed schools in the Town. Administratively, there have been five different levels of government involved in the administration of the state's elementary education: state, town, district, county, and city. Both the 1848 constitution and the first education bill passed by the state legislature in 1848 were concerned with three of these levels: state, district, and town. … Towns were usually divided into a number of local districts, which were the most numerous and powerful administrative units until the 1960s. The three member elected district boards were empowered to hire teachers and establish policies for individual schools. These two duties gave them firm control over educational policy in most of the state's elementary schools. It is important to remember that there was usually a significant difference between city and village schools and the one room schools of the countryside. Generally, the former were larger, more substantial buildings that tended to be better equipped than the rural schools, largely because of the broader tax base that supported city schools. For most of Wisconsin's history, the smaller rural schools far outnumbered the richer village and city schools. In 1923, for example, there were 6475 one room schools in the state compared to only 555 schools that employed two or more teachers. There were, of course, some one room schools in villages, jut as there were a few rural schools that employed more than one teacher. But in general, the one room schools were rural, and the larger schools were in the villages and cities.(1) The only historic public buildings that were surveyed in the Town of Perry were its schools, all of which are one or two-room schools that represented either the second or third generation of the schools associated with the Town's school districts. As was true in all of Dane County's other Towns in the county's early years, the very first classes taught in the Town of Perry were conducted in private homes or in whatever other buildings might be available. The first buildings built specifically for school purposes were often very small one room log structures, none of which are now believed to be extant. As the Town's school-age population increased, however, the Town was divided into five school districts; the Daleyville School District, the Spring Valley School District, the Forward School District, the Tyvand School District, and the Meadow View School District, and the surviving school buildings that were surveyed are associated with these districts. These first generation schools were soon replaced by frame, stone, or more rarely, brick examples. Ironically, the two newest surveyed schools in the Town are both second generation buildings. The oldest of the two is the Tyvand School, which was built in 1923-1924 to replace the original stone school built prior to 1873.(2) This is a frame One-Story-Cube form building that has now been remodeled and converted into a single family residence. The newest of the two is the Spring Valley School, which was built out of brick in 1938 to replace the original one-room frame school that had been built in 1860.(3) As the Town's school districts grew richer and as the numbers of school-age children in these districts increased, new and larger two-room schools also began to appear. Frame examples of this type were surveyed in the hamlets of Daleyville and Forward. Both of these were third generation schools that were built to replace smaller one-room schools, the Daleyville school having been built in 1895 to replace one built out of stone in 1868,(4) and the Forward School having been built in 1910 to replace one built out of stone in 1875(5). A third example, the Meadow View School, was built out of brick in 1906 and replaced an earlier frame building. The 1906 school is a Front Gable form building and it has now been remodeled and is a single family residence.(6) Parochial schools have also played a role in the educational history of the Town as well. The most important of these have been the schools associated with the Holy Redeemer Roman Catholic Church and with the Perry Lutheran Church. Both of these congregations had active parochial schools but neither had separate school buildings for these activities. Instead, classes were held either in the homes of congregation members or in the churches themselves.(7)
NOTES ON SOURCES
EXTANT RESOURCES SURVEYED Public Schools Film Code Address Original Name Date _______Location ______ DA 186/13 1060 STH 78 Daleyville School 1893/1934/1969 Hamlet of Daleyville
BIBLIOGRAPHY Breines, Rev. Andrew R.. (pastor). Holy Redeemer Mission, Perry, Wisconsin: 1861-1961. Madison: Craftsman Press Corp., 1961. Perry Ev. LutheranChurch: 100th Anniversary, 1854-1954. Daleyville, WI: (The Congregation), 1954. Perry Historical Center. The Historic Perry Norwegian Settlement. Daleyville, WI: The Perry Historical Center, 1994. Wyatt, Barbara (Ed.). Cultural Resource Management in Wisconsin. Historic Preservation Division, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, 1986, Vol. 3, (Education). Endnotes: 1. Wyatt, Barbara (Ed.). Cultural Resource Management in Wisconsin. Historic Preservation Division, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, 1986, Vol. 3, pp. 2-5 — 2-7 (Education).
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