OLD SCHOOL OF THE DAY
Wolfe School House, District No. 55
Sutton Nebraska Museum
309 N Way Ave.
Sutton, NE 68979
The Sutton Museum is the home of the Sutton Historical Society and is dedicated to the collection and preservation of historic artifacts and information about the Sutton, Nebraska community. The Sutton Historical Society operates a museum complex including a museum, a restored 1908 vintage historic Sutton home, and a country school museum. Very early in the life of the Sutton Historical Society, they discussed acquiring a country school building as part of their museum. The country school was too much a part of the history of the area not to be featured in any museum. It just so happened that he county fairgrounds board had a country school which was in the way of some of their development plans, and they were offering the building to any interested party. So the Sutton Historical Society took it.
The city stepped up and offered the Society the perfect spot in the southeast corner of the city park, a piece of ground that had been orphaned from the main portions of the park when the course of School Creek was streamlined in the 1990’s. And even better, that location was on the same street as the building that the Society already owned separated only by one house, which they later managed to capture giving them several contiguous lots for the museum. Thus, they have the school building from District No. 55, the Wolfe School which originally sat two miles north of Fairfield. The last school board had given the school to the county fair board fully equipped and furnished and in excellent repair. It was perfect for museum use with student desks, a teacher’s desk, pot-belly stove, piano, blackboard, books – the works. The blackboard extends across the front wall and there is the classic elevated stage at the front of the room.
The Wolfe School has two rooms in the corners beside the front door. Those were the old “utility” rooms used as coat closets, storage and for drinking water, etc. The ceiling was dropped sometime in the history of the building leaving a four or five foot tall space between the new and old levels. Rural schools did not have indoor plumbing. Two outhouses “out back” served for toilet facilities. The Sutton Historical Society’s rural school museum came from Lone Tree Township in Clay County, Nebraska, about four miles southwest of Clay Center and two miles north of Fairfield. The school house was known as the Wolfe School in District #55 and operated until the 1962-1963 school year; Dorothy Shaw was the last teacher in the Wolfe school when there were six students. One school desk has been added to the arrangement of the school. This desk of a distinctive design has been in the basement of a house in Sutton for many years. It came from a rural school about five miles north of Sutton, District #8, one of the two schools in School Creek Township that were designated as “Nuss Schools,” the other being District #16.
District #8 was in the middle of a large tract of land that was settled by the Germans from Russia who found a home in the Sutton area after 1873. They built their first school furnishing it with desks of this design, a design that they were familiar with in Russia, and probably earlier in Germany. When they built their second school they furnished that school with desks of the much more common design for American schools, the design of the rest of the desks in the room. The District #55 museum school has also found a new purpose thanks to the Sutton Schools 4th grade classes. For the past few years they have incorporated the school into their Apple Valley block where they re-enact classes in a one-room school house. The students come to the museum school at the beginning of the block to be assigned to their families for the term and then return weeks later to graduate from Apple Valley in the school house. The Sutton Museums are open on Sunday’s from 2 – 5 p.m. or by appointment. They especially like to show off Wolfe School.