Memories of a Pioneer School Teacher

The following newspaper article appeared in 1949 and celebrates the 90th birthday of Ruth Irish Preston with memories of her days as a teacher and her youthful days growing up in the American west. 

Former Teacher Here Awaits 90th Birthday: Ruth Irish Preston Tells Pioneer Experience in Old Third Ward School

Few of us can hope to celebrate our ninetieth birthday. But Mrs. Ruth Irish Preston of Davenport, granddaughter of a pioneer settler of Iowa City, is not only celebrating hers Sunday, but has written for the occasion her reminiscences of the old Third Ward school, now only an affectionate memory in Iowa City hearts, where she was principal in the early eighties [1880s].

Mrs. Preston (then Ruth Ann Irish) was born in Tama County in 1859, where her father Charles Wood Irish, a civil engineer, and mother Abigail Yarborough Irish, had moved from Iowa City.

Her first four years were lived in a log cabin in a clearing on the edge of the Reservation of the Sac and Fox Indians who made much of the baby Ruth and her sister Elizabeth. Then the family returned to Iowa City, where Ruth Irish was educated.

After teaching a term in Coralville, Ruth Irish entered the Iowa City schools at the age of sixteen as a teacher in the Third ward building, and at nineteen became its principal.

On the eve of her 90th birthday she remembers:

"This school was named in honor of Benjamin Franklin and the building stood in a grove of stately trees facing Davenport street on the south and Johnson on the east.

"West of the building was a little creek trickling down into the wider Ralston, on the west bank of which was the cottage of Bohumil Shimek, a gunsmith, who had over his door a long black gun with fixed bayonet proclaiming his trade. He had two children, a little girl, Jessie, and a by, Bohumil (later professor of botany at the University of Iowa).

"The wooded tract extending to the top of Morrison's hill on the north and to the F.M. Irish addition on the east was a wonderful playground for the children."

Northeast Iowa City in the seventies and eighties was made up largely of recent settlers from Bohemia and Germany, still clinging to the customs and language of the Old Country, making neat gardens and improving the food larder by keeping a cow, a pig andflocks of strutting geese that lorded it over the city streets....

"Families were big in the Third ward, and the school was always crowded. At one time there were 125 pupils in my room, some of them sitting on the floor.

"Under these conditions classroom discipline was difficult, and our principal had her own ideas about enforcing it. One was to look through the keyhole into a classroom and come in like a thunderclap to punish any whom she had seen misbehaving.

"After I had taught under this lady for three years, she was transferred to another district. I was only 19 but the fact that I had been conducting examinations int he summers for county teachers, may have been the reason I was chosen as the new principal. I held the position for seven more years."

The summer of 1880 took Ruth Irish across what was then the Indian frontier in the Dakotas, into land still claimed by the wild Sioux tribes that had been driven westward by the white man all the way from New York State.

Here her father had headed a surveying party to carry the line of the North Western railroad westward, and she witnessed the great council of the Sioux chiefs wit the officials of the army and the railroad, in which it was decided that the roadbed would be allowed to pass across the Indian lands. 

Place in charge of the captain and his wife, the two girls, Ruth and Elizabeth, journeyed up the Missouri on a steamer carrying troops and supplies to Fort Pierre, then an important outpost against Indian invasion, where they were met by their father and mother.

The town was full of colorful characters. The famous "Calamity Jane" was there, and William "Buffalo Bill" Cody was stopping at the little frame hotel where the Irishes put up till their wagons were ready to head for the surveying camp. 

In camp the women as well as the men went armed and a lookout had to be posted to warn of the approach of white desparados, as well as the mounted parties of Indians that were scouting all around. They were fairly sure of the Indians, for their chiefs had counted Charles Wood Irish as a friend and had affectionately given him the name of "Cha."

Mrs. Preston tells the story of the head of one of the roving Indian parties, a young chief called "Jumping Thunder," who came riding into camp and ceremoniously smoked the pipe of peace with the leaders of the party. All went well until Ruth surreptitiously got out a pad and pencil and started to sketch the profile of the young Indian.

Seeing what she was doing, he came over, looked at the side view she had drawn and demanded to know what had become of the other side of his face.

Convinced that it had been carried away by an evil spirit, he flew into a rage, jumped on his pony, drew his hunting knife and brandished his rife. Then apparently realizing that it was beneath his dignity to quarrel with a squaw, he wheeled his pony and galloped away.

Miss Irish resgned as head of the Third Ward School in 1886 and spent a year teaching watercolor classses in her home while she studied botany at the University of Iowa under Bohumil Shimek, son of the gunsmith by the creek. 

In 1887 she was married to the late Dr. Charles Hicklen preston, an Iowa Citizen who had graduated in medicine at Iowsa in 1870, intermed at Belleview hospital and set up a practice at Davenport.

Mrs. Preston is celebrating her ninetieth birthday in the home they founded. With her are her sister Elizabeth, 93, and her children, Sue Abigail, Ella Elizabeth and Charles Irish Preston. 

Source:

Iowa City Press-Citizen, "Former Teacher Here Awaits 90th Birthday", June 25, 1949, Page 9. Accessed through Newspapers.com