The Making of Our Wisconsin Schools 1848-1948

By Edgar G. Doudna

Foundation for Education

What is the story of a hundred years of public education in Wisconsin? How has the transformation from the limited opportunity of the log school house and the Three R’s to the modern highly organized school system been achieved? This is a brief and necessarily incomplete answer to these questions.

The century between 1848 and 1948 saw an educational revolution not unlike the Industrial Revolution, and with consequences as far-reaching and momentous. The area of educational opportunity expanded horizontally and vertically so that doors have been opened and educational institutions made available to almost every person of every age everywhere. In Wisconsin, Jefferson’s ideal of a “system of education which shall reach every description of citizen from the richest to the poorest” has been very nearly realized, for there is “a great educational ladder with one end in the gutter and the other in the University.” In fact, Wisconsin has several ladders.

Education a State Function

Although education is generally accepted as a state function and each of the 48 states sets up a school system which it organizes, maintains, and controls, there are distinct national patterns and trends which tend to unify the educational system of the nation. Political, economic, social, and religious forces everywhere affect the ideas, ideals, and practices of the schools in each of the states. So the story of our Wisconsin public schools cannot be told in isolation, but must be interpreted in relation to our national development and changing social patterns.

Wisconsin has often been a leader in education, although sometimes it is a laggard; support for schools has been alternately generous and grudgingly; development has been rapid and despairingly slow; leadership has been inspired and dynamic or indifferent and inert. At times there were positive and definite drives ahead, and at others there has been aimless drifting, but on the whole the movement has been quietly and consistently forward.

Literacy 1848-1948

Education through a state system of schools and colleges was an early concern of many Wisconsin leaders. A common error is to think of the pioneer as crude and illiterate and interested only in subduing the land and acquiring a competence for himself and family. A biographer of one of Wisconsin’s educators writes of him as “bringing the gospel of education into a wilderness of illiteracy.” This is a striking sentence but only partially true. He did carry a torch for education, but it was to a people already interested in schools and colleges. The average literacy, meaning the ability to read and write whether in English or some other language, was almost as high in 1848 as it is in 1948, and much higher than in 1870.

The first United States census (1850) after Wisconsin became a state reported the population as 305,391 with 1,551 persons of native birth unable to read and write. Of the foreign born, who constituted about one-third of the population, there were 4,902 illiterates. The total illiteracy of the entire population was just over two percent. The 1940 census which registered those “who had never attended school” was 1.7 percent. Our first citizens showed many evidences of their interest in the kingdom of the mind. There were 72 libraries in Wisconsin, not large to be sure, but supplied with the basic books of English and American literature. There were six daily and 35 weekly newspapers and three “literary magazines” published in the state. In every community the better books and magazines were purchased and read, usually by many people.

Many of the settlers felt strongly that their children should learn to “read, write, and cipher.” Long before 1848 there were private schools and semi-public schools of various degrees of excellence in the scattered settlements. At the early French trading posts, the missionaries made teaching of the children second only to the extension of their churches. In the lead region of the Southwest, under the influence of the miners and farmers from Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, schools were established and academies and colleges were planned. What was probably the first school house in Wisconsin was built near Platteville in 1834 for Samuel Huntington’s school.

At the military posts of Fort Howard (Green Bay), Fort Crawford (Prairie du Chien) and Fort Winnebago (Portage) classes for the children of the men stationed there were organized, and incidental instruction was given to some Indian children.

Population Blends

Soon after the Black Hawk War in 1832, there was a large movement of settlers into Wisconsin. They came largely from New England, New York, and the South. Foreign immigration was just beginning on a large scale, and many Germans were attracted to this territory. This motley population had to learn to live together by making mutual adjustments. An observer from Europe wrote understandingly of this blending, which much later was called “the melting pot.” “They meet half way,” he says, “and embrace; and the society thus organized is more liberal, enlarged, unprejudiced, and of course more affectionate and pleasant than a society of a single origin and character, who bring all their early prejudices as a common stock, to be transmitted as an inheritance in perpetuity. A large factor in this adjustment was the common school.

Legal Basis for Schools

The Ordinance of 1787, one of the three charters of Wisconsin, contained the famous sentence - “religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary for good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall be forever encouraged.” Here the school systems of the Old Northwest found their ideological basis and their workable beginnings.

The Ordinance prescribed a form of government for the territory and its division into not less than three nor more than five states. The states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin were successively organized after passing through the status of territories. Wisconsin was in turn a part of each of them until it was organized as a territory on July 4, 1836.

All of the early schools of Wisconsin were established under the school laws of Michigan. This code was automatically transferred to the territory of Wisconsin when it was set apart in 1836. Under the Michigan law enacted in 1827, every town having 50 families was required to support a common school. With every additional hundred families another school had to be established. In Wisconsin this law was modified to require the organization of a school district wherever electors reside in a township in which Section 16 had been surveyed. Each district was required to elect three directors who should locate the school house, hire a teacher for at least three months, and levy a pro rata tax on the attendance of pupils. The cost of education for the children of those unable to pay the tax was assessed against the entire district.

This law was amended by the territorial legislature in 1839, and the rate system was abolished. A tax of not to exceed one-fourth of one percent for building schools and to support them was to be raised by the county commissioner. A teacher without a certificate from a town school inspector could be fined $50, with one-half of the fine going to the informer. With some modifications, this code operated until the territory achieved statehood.

Movement for Statehood

During the territorial period, the population increased from 11,000 to 300,000. Agitation for statehood, which began almost as soon as the territorial government began to function, had by 1845 become insistent. One of the chief arguments urged in promoting statehood was the need for a state school system. Since Congress was following the policy of admitting states in pairs, one slave and one free, the annexation in 1845 of Texas as a slave state added to the pressure for the organization of Wisconsin as a free state. In 1846, Congress passed an enabling act authorizing Wisconsin to form a constitution and become a member of the federal union. Channing, in his history of the United States, called 1846, “the most memorable year in American history,” and Bernard DeVoto has written a volume centering around the westward movements of that year. His title, “The Year of Decision,” is indicative of the importance attached to the events of the year in which Wisconsin men were formulating a constitution for the new state, only to have it rejected because of some radical

provisions regarding banks, boundaries, the judiciary, and ownership of property by married women.

That it was a radical document is not strange, and it is understandable why the people did not accept it. The western world was in political turmoil; Europe was a ferment of social upheavals and incipient revolutions. The United States, which was just emerging from the depression years which followed the panic of 1837, was deluged with social, economic, and political panaceas of every kind, most of them much to the left of the principles of Adam Smith and John Locke. In Wisconsin, a cooperative colony at Ripon and a Mormon settlement near Burlington were conspicuous experiments in Utopias.

Education in the Constitution

The men who framed the rejected constitution of 1846 were young, their average age was 38. The majority of them had come to Wisconsin very recently from the east, mainly from New England and New York. Nearly all of them were farmers or young professional men on the make, earnest in their desire to lay the foundations of the state on progressive or even radical bases. Many had a very good formal education, and almost without exception they wanted schools, academies, and colleges and were eager to carry out the letter and spirit of the Ordinance of 1787. Two members of the territorial legislature, Michael Frank and C. Latham Sholes, had long urged the establishment of a public school system. The influence of Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, and DeWitt Clinton had reached Wisconsin with settlers who came from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York and brought with them the beginning of an educational awakening which demanded better schools and much better teachers.

Education was regarded by the constitutional conventions as an important subject, for the need of a statewide school system had been a potent argument for statehood. In order to inform themselves fully of the best educational practices, the members invited Henry Barnard, one of America’s leading educators, to discuss education before the convention. He spoke twice to members and invited friends of education, and among other recommendations made a strong plea for better teachers and the establishment of a university and normal schools. As a result, the committee on education in the article on education provided for normals schools. This section was considered twice, failing by votes of 48 to 49 and 48 to 51, and so did not become a part of the proposed constitution, but it planted the idea of normal schools in the public mind. Considering that in 1846 the three normal schools of Massachusetts and the one in New York were still experimental and insecure, it was a notable achievement for the advocates of better education for teachers. There was no argument about the establishment of a state university, and the first legislature in 1848 created the University of Wisconsin.

After the constitution of 1846 had been rejected, a second convention was convened in 1847. Many of the more controversial matters of the first instrument were omitted from the constitution framed by this convention and left for legislative determination. The article on education (X) was revised and a clause providing for normal schools was added to the section directing the establishment of a school fund.

Thus the state of Wisconsin provided in its fundamental law for a complete educational system with an educational ladder for all the children of all the people, for trained teachers, and or libraries.

Federal Land Grants

As already stated, the Ordinance of 1787 and the Land Ordinance of 1785 were largely responsible for the rise of state common school systems. The cession by the original states to the general government of all of the lands west of the Allegheny mountains and south of the Canadian border to the Mississippi gave the new nation an incredibly rich area.

The government land was surveyed under the direction of Thomas Hutchins, who developed a simple and easily understood system of land measurements and records to displace the crude, complicated, inaccurate, and unreliable surveys then in use. By this method the land was divided into congressional townships six miles square containing 36 sections of 640 acres each. Sections were subdivided into “halves” and “quarters” and these divisions were again split into “eighties” and “forties.” By this simple but accurate system lands were easy to locate and identify and titles were clearly and adequately described. The method has been used in all surveys of public lands.

The Land Ordinance of 1785 had provided that “there should be preserved the lot No. 16 of every township for the maintenance of public schools within the said township.” Subsequent congresses ratified the grant and on this foundation common school funds were created and a precedent established for the further distribution of land to the states. The history of the land grants is long and involved, but for our purpose it is sufficient to say that they were educational self-starters which granted the pioneers a financial subsidy that enabled them to provide schools much more certainly than they could have done unaided.

Common School Fund

The Constitution of Wisconsin (Article X) provided that all lands granted to the state by the general government for educational purposes or “any grant to the state when the purposes of such grants are not specified” should be set apart as a school fund, the income to be used for the support of the common schools, libraries, academies, and normal schools. The Secretary of State, the State Treasurer, and the Attorney General were made a Land Commission to manage the funds. The administration of the school lands is a rather unpleasant story, although the mismanagement has been exaggerated. By comparison, with disposition of land grants for railroads and canals, the school lands seem comparatively free from the frauds which made much unsavory history.

The Legislature of 1856 appointed a committee to investigate the management of the school lands, a characteristic procedure wherein we lock the barn after the horse is stolen. Making due allowance for political bias, rhetorical emphasis, and oratorical phrasing, and that this legislature was the most venal in the history of the state, the report showed that there were gross irregularities, slovenly bookkeeping, lack of vouchers or receipts, and defective mortgages and contracts. There was evidence to show that some of the commissioners and employees engaged in speculations for themselves for themselves and their friends; that they issued certificates of sale with no payments; that they sold timber lands on 20-year contracts which were cleared of all timber and the cut-over lands reverted to the state with no payment for the land. The report says:

The School Fund has sustained great loss by these irregularities, and also by the haste with which the school lands have been brought into the market. Tens of thousands of dollars have been embezzled, and hundreds of thousands lost and squandered. The fund has been handled with criminal negligence, wanton recklessness, and utter disregard for the most responsible duties that could be imposed on man.

Every state superintendent of public instruction protested the practices of the legislature and the commissioners, but without success. In fact, the practices complained of in the report just quoted must have continued, for another report made in 1861 says:

Truth compels the confession that this trust has been and is now of necessity, most unfaithfully administered. The best of the school lands have been disposed of with eager haste and disregard of the interest of the funds for which they were dedicated.

Nevertheless, there was something to be said for the commissioners. The legislature itself was responsible for the worst abuses. There was great pressure exerted on the Commission to release the lands for settlement as soon and as easily as possible. Few were taking the long look ahead. Development, settlement, and exploitation were pushed ahead of everything else. An illuminating statement is made by Herman Hartel, who served as Emigration Agent for the board. He said:

In my daily intercourse with the emigrant I directed the attention to those to purchase land to the school lands of the state, showing to those of limited means that they could at once plant themselves in an entirely independent situation. I have had the satisfaction to learn that large quantities of these lands have been sold chiefly to actual settlers.

Mr. Hartel was an aggressive agent. He advertised Wisconsin in many European papers as well as in those of the eastern states. In eight months he reports 317 letters of inquiry and personal visits of over 3,000 prospective buyers, of whom two- thirds were German. There is no taint of dishonesty here.

An illustration of legislative action occurred in 1864, during the Civil War. In a single day, 11 laws were approved appropriating drainage fund money, which the Legislature of 1858 had specifically indicated was to be used for the “purpose of carrying out the Act of Congress,” to road building. A decision of the Supreme Court many years later (1915) said that in this action “there was substantial forgetfulness of the primary purpose of the swamp land grant and any constitutional claim as well.” These laws gave land to Clark and Marathon counties for road building and incidentally to drainage; ten sections to Oconto county for a bridge; to Crawford, LaCrosse, and Vernon counties lands for a road, nothing being said about drainage; to Juneau and Wood for the same purpose, and in Calument and Manitowoc counties for bridge building, and for building district school houses. Here was “diversion” with a vengeance. The Legislatures of 1866, 1867, and 1868 dipped into the land funds but not to the extent of the raids of 1864.

Normal School Fund

The Normal School Fund was created by the Legislature in 1857. It therefore escaped some of the administrative abuses of the other funds. In 1850, Congress had granted to the State of Arkansas all swamp and overflowed lands in that state to which the United States still held title. They also extended the privileges of this law to all the other states in which any such land was located. Under this act, Wisconsin had a large amount of relatively poor land given to it with rather vague instructions as to its use. It was understood that the proceeds should be used so far as necessary to reclaim the land by drainage operations. However, the Constitution of Wisconsin explicitly said that the proceeds of all land grants by the United States which were not expressly dedicated by Congress should be set over into the school fund.

The Law of 1857 granted one-fourth of the proceeds to a normal school fund. It was amended in 1865 by allocating one-half of the swamp land fund to the Normal School Fund income but with a provision that until the Common School Fund had an annual income of $200,000 only 25 percent was to be transferred to that fund.

The lands received from the United States by this grant were to be chosen by Wisconsin in one of two ways. One was for the State to survey the lands at its own expense and have the lists approved by the General Land Office. The other was to make selections from the field notes of the government surveys. Governor Dewey chose the second plan, and thus lost a very large acreage. The easier and cheaper method proved to be the costly and wasteful way. But by the influence of the land commissioners and later governors, large additions were received so that altogether the Swamp Land Fund received 1,350,610 acres in 1851 and various additions until it had assigned to it almost 5,000,000 acres.

The history of the management of this fund is on the whole much pleasanter reading than that of the Common School Fund, although the same generalizations will apply. The greed of speculators, the rapacity of some of the lumber companies, the cupidity and docility of the legislatures, and much inept administration caused regrettable losses.

University Fund

The history of the University and Agricultural College Funds is brief. All that has been said of the management and mismanagement of the Common School Fund and the Normal School Fund is applicable to these funds.

An Act of Congress in 1838 granted the territory of Wisconsin two townships to establish an institution of higher learning. This amounted to 46,065 acres. Another grant in 1854 added two more townships with 45,914 acres. The proceeds of the first grant amounted to about $150,000. The lands chosen in the second grant were located in Pierce, Portage, and Kewaunee counties. They were appraised at $3.00 per acre when their actual market value was from $5.00 to $10.00 an acre. The procedure was quite like that followed in marketing the schools’ lands, but the returns were much lower. There was very little public interest in a university, and the legislatures were distinctly unfriendly. No direct appropriation for the state university was made until after the close of the Civil War in 1866.

In 1862, Congress passed a bill granting to the states 30,000 acres for each Senator and Representative in the Congress for the encouragement of agricultural and mechanical education. Lands under this act were badly selected and netted but $3.50 an acre. Wisconsin received 240,000 acres under this grant, making a total of 331,979 acres in the original endowment of the University. It is humiliating to know that Cornell University, which bought script for 600,000 acres in Wisconsin, realized over $5,000,000 dollars and the State University only $300,000.

A great deal of bitterness has been expressed because the land grants did not produce a larger endowment. One governor went so far as to say that nine-tenths had been lost. This, of course, is a gross exaggeration. A more recent commentator says, “There is probably no worse example of mismanaged public educational funds on record.” But after all, 144 sections is not a large grant - pressure for sales and settlement was terrific, legislatures were vacillating and contradictory, the commissioners were ex-officio officers occupied with their own offices. Modern accounting and budgetary controls were unknown, and the standard of public morals condoned many political practices, which are now labeled as dishonest and criminal.

There were other than financial values accruing from the land grants. They focused attention upon the importance of the public school system; they emphasized and forced state control; they raised the level of public educational ideals; and they symbolized the interest of the pioneer in schools. “They are a perpetual monument to the people’s belief in free and universal public education.”

On June 30, 1947, the productive funds derived from the land grants amounted to $18,837,401.10, distributed as follows:

Common School Fund -----------$12,925,223.23*
Normal School Fund ------------- 5,375,396.24
Agricultural College Fund ------- 303,409.53
University Fund -------------------- 233,372.10

*The common school fund includes receipts from fines and other sources as specified in the constitution.

The income from each fund only is used. The funds are held as a trust fund.

A Decade of Growth

In the decade between 1840 and 1850, the population of Wisconsin rose from 30,749 to 305,391, a gain of 886.88%, an almost unbelievable growth. The largest age group in 1850 was that between 20 and 30. These young new settlers were anxious to provide public or private schools. In Glenway Wescott’s The Grandmothers, Mr. Tower says: “Just at this time a serious question confronted the pioneer mothers in this section of the township. They said how, when, and where are we going to educate our children and prepare them for the duties and responsibilities of life and good citizenship? There was but one answer to this question viz., the school. A school we must and shall have.”

Under the leadership of public spirited persons, the children were brought together and organized into a school. Usually the only public building available was a church, and the teacher some person who had taught in the East. Textbooks were scarce, but generally Webster’s Speller and a miscellaneous assortment of primers, readers, and arithmetics could be collected. The school year was one term of three months.

Organizing a School District

The difficulties of setting up a school are well illustrated by the efforts of the town of New Franken in Brown County. This community was settled in 1845 by a group of German immigrants from Bavaria. With the usual industry and optimism of the pioneer they developed farms, built a saw mill, and organized a community. They soon set about the problem of providing a school for their children. There was sporadic individual and private instruction before they got around to calling a school meeting on October 1, 1849. The meeting was attended by 18 voters who agreed to use the old log house of John P. Schauer for the school. They elected a clerk, director, and treasurer, and resolved:

1. That the school officers provide for the purchase of a stove and the inner arrangement of the school house.
2. That the clerk notify the parents who have children attending school that they provide the school with stove wood.
3. That for the purchase of a stove with pipes, and lumber for the manufacture of desks and blackboard, a levy of $30.00 be made on taxable property.
4. That for a teacher’s salary a tax of four shillings per 80 acres be raised.
5. That the school officers fix the rent to be paid for the use of the house.
6. That the school officers sign the minutes.

School finally opened on June 24, 1850, with 21 children in attendance. The teacher received $12.50 per month. The first treasurer’s report (September 28, 1850) showed:

Money allowed-------------------------------$118.28
Delinquent Tax ---------------------------------12.90 ½
Total Received ---------------------------$105.37 ½
Teacher’s Salary ----------------------------------$ 36.00
To Clerk for Paper ------------------------------- .12 ½
To treasurer for two walks to Green Bay (17 miles)
to receive school money -------------- ---------------1.25
Total Expense -------------------------------37.37
Balance ------------------------------------$ 68.00

In October it was decided to build a school house 18 x 20 on land purchased for $2.50, to levy a school tax, and submit the choice of a teacher to “the will of the people.” The contract for the building was let for $41.00. Specifications called for a double floor of planed plank, not to be nailed down until the wood should be dry; three windows with 8 x 10 panes, and a paneled door. The district was to supply logs and lumber, but the contractor was to furnish nails and glass and four writing tables 2 ½ x 6 feet; eight 6-foot benches, and one blackboard. When the plan did not go through, “Schoolmaster Burkhart” offered to roof the school, finish gables, put in the windows, make doors, and lay the floor if the school board would furnish the window frames with glass. This project was not carried through and while many prolonged meetings were held, school was conducted in a private home. In the meantime the teacher, not Burkhart, was accused of having a poor moral character, and of having a bad influence on the pupils, in consequence of which parents refused to send their children to school so that only six or eight pupils attended. The treasury was now empty and no one knew who should pay the teacher. An appeal was made to State Superintendent Azel P. Ladd who decided as this was virtually a private school, the individuals who hired the teacher must pay him.

In May 1854 “Schoolmaster Burkhart” was engaged to teach six hours a day, 22 days per month, for five months at $18.00 per month. The school ran with 31 pupils until the $63.00 in the treasury was exhausted.

In September of 1854 it was decided to build a log school, with these specifications:

1. Good rafter roof covered with shingles.
2. Walls to be squared and chinked up with plaster.
3. Double boarded floor of matched lumber, upper boards planed.
4. Door with latch, hinges, and padlock.
5. Gable ends closed with clapboards.
6. Four windows with frames and shutters.

The contract was let for $89.00 and the building was finished on May 7, 1855. The board found fault with floor, plastering of the chinks, fastening of the shutters, the rafters, shingles and gable ends. Aside from this it was acceptable. The contractor was given until May 10 to correct the defects, which he did. School opened in the summer and continued until “Schoolmaster Burkhart” died of Asiatic cholera after school had been in session three months and 19 days. Except that in 1857 it was voted that German should be taught during one-half of the school day, the school followed the usual district pattern. A new school was built in 1874.

The New Franken School represents the struggles of a foreign language group to establish and maintain a school in an agricultural area on the fringe of the old French frontier.

A School System Begins

State organization of schools was in its infancy. But a start was being made in another type of community at Southport, now Kenosha. Here was a village of 500, largely settled by former residents of New England and New York, and one of the most socially-minded settlements in the Old Northwest. There were newspapers, lyceums, debating societies, and other community activities to arouse interest in public questions. Also there was a leader, a lesser Horace Mann, who devoted his energies to the development of local schools and the organization of a state school system.

Michael Frank had come to Southport in 1839 from New York in the migration that followed the Black Hawk War. His father, who was a highly educated man, had come to New York from a small principality in Germany and promptly enlisted in Washington’s Army serving until the end of the war. He received 640 acres of land in western New York as a bonus for his services. Here he combined farming with literary work, for he mastered the English language easily and thoroughly. On this farm, and in this highly intellectual atmosphere, Michael Frank was born in 1804. He went to the district school but largely educated himself from his father’s and neighbors’ libraries. At an early age he became a teacher and then a superintendent with 40 schools under his supervision. He was greatly stirred by the publication of Victor Cousin’s study of the German school system for the French government which had been translated and reprinted in New York in 1835. This report had a marked effect on the men who that year wrote the constitution of Michigan. They organized the schools in what seemed to be a pure imitation of those of Prussia. Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, and Calvin Stowe later went over much of the same ground, and the German system had great influence on the first state systems set up in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. All of them contributed to our Wisconsin schools, which are a complex of German and New England ideas modified by frontier conditions.

When Frank was 35 years old he came to the little village of Southport. He had experience as a teacher, supervisor and administrator and was determined to make education “as free as the air we breathe,” by having the schools organized under state control and supported entirely by taxation. There was of course much opposition to his program from the so-called higher classes who supported private schools and academies. Another group without children objected to paying for the education of their neighbor’s children. In one debate a wealthy citizen exclaimed, “What! I should be taxed to pay for the education of the damned Dutch and Irish.” Private schools claimed vested rights in their fields. So in spite of a general approval of education, there was a formidable group opposed to free schools.

When Frank came to Southport, he found two small district schools and several private schools, with the supporters of the latter in a majority. Within a year he was a member of the local lyceum engaged in debating the question, “Ought common schools be supported by taxation upon property?” He helped organize a branch of Society of Free School Friends, and was made chairman of a committee to draft a code of by-laws for the district, including, of course, tax support for the schools.

In 1840 Frank and C. Latham Sholes, the inventor of the typewriter, were established as editors of the South Telegraph. Immediately there appeared a succession of editorials encouraging common schools. All of them centered around Frank’s basic proposition, “The success of our future welfare and prosperity depends more upon the character of our common schools than all the natural resources combined. Where primary education is neglected the most fatal consequences to human liberty may be expected to follow.”

In 1844 Frank was elected to the territorial legislature, where he succeeded in having enacted into law the right of the voters to tax themselves for public education. The act was applicable only to Southport, and then only when approved by a vote of the people. On April 30, 1845, approval was secured by a vote of 90 to 79. School was opened in the summer in the basement of the Catholic Church. No school building had yet been provided, although trustees and superintendents had been elected. During the year, a school house was erected and a system of schools established which became the pattern for Wisconsin schools. This was the first attempt in Wisconsin to form a local school system. Without such a plan there could have been no grading, classification of pupils, and local supervision.

There were soon three kinds of school organizations in the state, the local school district operating a one-room school; the independent city school system; and the township system. The high school had not yet been organized, but, when it appeared, a further complication in management and control was introduced. The township organization gave way to the county superintendency in 1861, but except for that change the pattern of 1849 still persists.

The first legislature set up a commission to codify and revise the territorial and state laws which were in force at the close of the 1848 session. Governor Dewey appointed two lawyers, Charles Jordan and Charles Baker, and Michael Frank, who was not an attorney. It fell to him to codify and revise the school laws of 1839, 1840, 1841, and 1848. His work was made especially difficult by the restrictions imposed in Article X of the Constitution, but the legislature adopted it without many changes.

Michael Frank thus had become the educational father of our Wisconsin schools. He ranks with Mann, Barnard, Mills, and Pierce as founders of the American system of tax-supported schools.

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Posted March 6, 1998