A Grande Education: One Hundred Schools in the County of Grande Prairie, 1910-1960.

Ross, Campbell

A Grande Education: One Hundred Schools in the County of Grande Prairie, 1910-1960

by Mary B. Nutting. Grande Prairie: South Peace Regional Archives. 216 pp., illus., $30. Available from South Peace Regional Archives, Box 687 Grande Prairie, AB, T8V 3A8. Email [email protected].

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Why 1910? In 1910 Walter McFarlane completed the survey of the Grande Prairie prior to the last great land rush in Alberta, indeed in North America. The Department of the Interior in the United States had declared their homestead frontier closed in 1892. By the end of the first decade in the 20th century, the homestead land in southern and central Alberta was registered. Only one 'delayed frontier' remained. Separated from the rest of Alberta by 200 kilometers of muskeg and northern woods, accessed from the south only by an uncertain wagon road, larger than California, just as large in the imagination of those seeking land of their own, lay the Peace Country. Within it the largest area of accessible arable land lay in the largest of the natural prairies within this belt of northern woods. This was the Grande Prairie.

Whereas many homesteaders in the parkland came from other countries, especially Eastern Europe, most of those who trekked to the Grande Prairie were already farmers or came from farming families in southern parts of Canada or northern United States. They had grown up in farming communities that had already developed the public institutions regarded as proper to respectable living, especially schools. This book tells the story of these schools.

The story of each original country school established within the present County of Grande Prairie is told attractively in an alphabetically organized, two-page presentation. Each of the accounts provides information on the founding of the school, engaging and insightful details of the human experiences within its walls, its physical design, several archival photographs, usually one document that illustrates the correspondence and teacher materials of teaching in that school, directions on how to locate the original site, and finally a guide to sources of further information contained in local histories.

There are two appendices: one excerpts from a teacher's diary, the other providing GPS coordinates for each school. The whole 4x4 country school experience was over by 1960.

Reviewed by Campbell Ross, education historian for northern Alberta