Craig, Genevieve

which came from:

Wrote, Eagle Picher Built a School. The first news of any Picher schools is in the fall of 1915 when the Eagle-Picher Company built the one-room building, now the main part of the Union Church, on the site where drilling and hay baling were rival occupations, and the Rev. Wesley Post was the little outpost's sole representative of law, order and school superintendent. For he not only organized the first church and Sunday School and did the preaching, but he represented the Company in hiring and paying the first teacher, Miss Edna James. By the time the old Whitebird mill, the first in the district was finished three pupils had graduated the eighth grade, a young Post among them, out of an enrollment of 15 coming from 10 or 12 families living in what is now Picher proper. So inextricably is the story of Picher's schools interwove with the community history that even now it is impossible to think of the one without permitting it to rest upon the vast background of wealth, industry and accomplishment of the other. It is to be said in accrediting the giddy, adventurous population of the untempered camp that no time was lost in setting up a conforming system of education and in one swift year during the course of which many houses were built by lantern light, the man who laid out Ottawa County Oklahoma's school districts, J. T. Davis, became the first superintendent and the magnificent new twin buildings were begun. In the summer of 1916 the teachers received their first month's salary without teaching because the buildings planned for the elementary and high school were incomplete. The desks from the one-room school were installed there. Soon other buildings were erected at the present sites of Douthat, Whitebird, Mineral Heights, and Cardin Oklahoma. Swelling rolls were housed in smaller temporary buildings, notable of which was the old Netta Street School, and when a declining population found their need out-grown, they were converted.