1873: 8 frame school houses
1874: 9 Wood frame schools with four male and 9 female teachers at an average salary of $27.80 month. 125 male and 108 female students. Unknown if this included high school age students tuitioned out or just the records of those enrolled in the 1-8 grades.
1875: 2 male and 16 female teachers. Average 110 daily
1876: No. 4- Milford aka Randau, Ada Hall. See page 315.
1882: No. 3- Pleasant Grove, Miss Frazier, No. 5- Center (aka Curtis), Miss Baughman. From 1882 and for 4 or 5 years Charles Curtiss taught at School Number 4. He is the Curtiss who became the Dean of Agriculture at Iowa State.
1885 The teachers for the Spring term at the rural schools of that year were: No. 1. Etta Pond * No. 2. C. B. Harrison No. 3. T. C. James No. 4. C. F. Curtiss ** No. 5. J. R. McCutchin No. 6. Sadie McNichols *** No. 7. Edward Binder No. 8. Mary Hardcastle **** No. 9. Maggie Bradford
*The A. C. Pond family was a long time resident in the northeast corner of Milford and it was their family member, Roy who was killed in an airplane accident. p38
**The Curtiss family lived a half mile east of the Center site and C. F. Curtiss was the Dean of Agriculture at ISU, but here, he had a mile and a half hike to No 4.
***The Michael McNichols family owned the northeast quarter of Sec 23 where the School Number 6 stood and he was the Director of that School at that time.
****The Hardcastles lived on the west side of Sec 33 so it was a mile and a half walk for Mary to get to School at No 8.
Maude Wakefield, later the County Supt of Schools in the ‘teens, taught at No 4 in 1896 and at No 2 in 1897.
1887: The Milford Township teacher list in the Nevada paper read as follows: No. 1- Clela New, No. 2- Lenora Jacobs, No. 3- Irma Doolittle, No. 4- Lillian Giebelstein, No. 5- Anna Judge, No. 6- Florence Knight, No. 7- Tarman, Relda Maudlin, No. 8- South, none yet, No. 9- Bateman aka Bridwell, Loella Smith.
1896-’97: All 9 Milford Twp 1-room rural schools were staffed: No.3- Pleasant Grove, George Kimble (‘27 Milford Twp, who attended the same school as a youth), No. 2- Blackberry, Miss Mable Ferguson, Others were listed without No.’s: Miss Genevieve Minkler. Also Miss Lyddie Danskin, Miss Stella Sherk, Miss Cora Sowers, Miss Letia Simmons, Miss Anna Hopkins, Miss Kate Mauser, George D. Ginn, and Miss Lena Sanders.
1903-’04: There were 15 teachers for the 9 Rural Schools in Milford Twp, 5 men and 10 woman and a total of 168 students.
1909-’11 Louise Rierson (Mrs Frank Menzel)
1917: No.3-Pleasant Grove, Miss Olive Tegland, also, Miss Agnes Lundeberg (Hofsted) school unknown. At this time, Maude Wakefield was the Story County Supt of Schools. She had taught at a one room school in Milford Twp.
1918-’19 Grace Olson at School Number 1. See Page 12.
OTHER Rural 1-ROOM TEACHERS from Milford Twp found in reports, but their year of teaching is not known are: No.9-Bateman (aka Bridwell): Miss Thornton and Miss Aris Cole.
Miss Maude Wakefield,who was later the Story County Supt, again not sure of her tenure, but know to be in 1917.
One thing becomes evident when comparing the names from one year to those of even a short time later and that is the large turnover of teachers.
Ol’ Milford Farmer wonder if, “Man who mix poison ivy with four leaf clover, have a rash of good luck”.
Milford Township, a 36 square mile township, was among Iowa’s earlier consolidated schools and was organized in 1920. Story County was one of the first two counties in the state to completely eliminate all their rural one room schools. It is interesting to note that at the time of some of the consolidation votes, three of the one room schools within Milford Twp were closed- two “for lack of students” (whatever that means) and the third because there was no place to “board” the teacher.
In 1920 when Milford Township Consolidated School was formed, three rural schools- Numbers 3, 6 and 9- were sold at public auction and not moved. No 3 school was the only brick structure. The others, numbers 1, 2, 4, 7, and 8 were moved to Sec 15 and joined with number 5 to form the site used for the consolidated school effort for the first nine grades and, a year later, the 10th grade. This is the explanation of why, for years, our School might be referred to as “Milford Township Consolidated Schools”- plural. The construction of the Milford Twp Consolidated School, a brick structure, shows the corner stone was set in 1923. The first graduation class was in 1927.
An interesting fact is that, in the State of Iowa, the first one-acre one-room school site that met the requirements of waiting 20-years after the site was no longer used to be granted back to the adjacent family farm was in Milford Twp. The Roy Borton family went through the Story County Court system in 1965 to regain the No 1 school plot or the one acre site on the NE corner of their farm in Sec. 11.