BINGHAM COUNTY SCHOOL HISTORY
A short history of Bingham County Schools
10/14/20263 min read
An 1887 Idaho Territory Statute stated that every child should attend school for 12 weeks, eight of them consecutively—somewhat different standards compared to today. Bingham County, established just two years before that legislation, already had 29 school districts at the time, a number that would rise to 90 just five years later. By 1910, when the County had 5000 students, there were just 56 districts—Fremont and Bannock Counties had taken major chunks out of Bingham, as would Bonneville in 1911, Power in 1913 and Butte in 1917, accounting for a diminished district count of 37 in 1919.
The teens were a time of school district "Balkanization" in the western part of Bingham County, albeit without the physical violence usually associated with that term. The Thomas/Rockford/Wilson Districts 12 and 48 squabbled for much of the decade about who was paying for what to build new schoolhouses in the area. District 48, which extended from Thomas westward into the desert beyond Taber, an immense area, found its area truncated in 1916—dry farmers were making an effort to tame the arid land and the distance to school by horse was much too great for the children. Even Taber's school, established in 1914 and teaching over forty students, was a dozen miles away.
Jacob Gohl, a Volga German born in the Ukraine and a Dakota resident prior to moving to southeast Idaho, petitioned the Commissioners in 1916 for a new district that encompassed 192 square miles. That area included what is now called Atomic City but which was then called Furey. The new Gohl district extended to the north border of Bingham County and was chipped from district 48, which at that time extended eastward beyond the Rockford Townsite.
Gohl was a dry farmer during those briefest of heydays on the desert from 1913-1920, that last year a finishing drought for most drylanders from American Falls to Dubois. Gohl and numerous others farmed within reach of the Delzer brothers' well at what is now Atomic City. He traveled miles to Delzer's to fill his 90 barrel cistern, which he used for domestic purposes. He had an additional two hundred barrel cistern that gathered snow runoff. His son, who lived near him, had two cisterns of 45 barrel size, one for domestic purposes which he, too, filled at Delzer's well. C. Sandau and at least seven other dry farmers also rode with wagons to Delzer's (that well would be the central point of a CCC camp in the mid 1930s) to furnish their domestic supplies. One of them, Dakota transplant George Schaffer, harvested 36 acres of fall rye that looked "like it would thresh eight bushels per acre"—he compared it to his spring rye crop that was a failure. Destitute by our standards, they nonetheless perceived wealth for a short time, but Gohl, like many before him, left the area in 1922, auctioning off his livestock and equipment.
The Gohl District school house was nearly completed in November of 1917 and the patrons were looking for a new teacher. About that same time, another set of desert-dwellers were aiming to 'secede' from Moreland School District #28. Residents of Flagtown, somewhat west of Moreland, and Campbellville, near what is now Liberty, sought a district of their own and secured an attorney to represent them at the Commissioner's Meeting. After a heated and lengthy session of give-and-take, a ninety square mile area was sliced from Moreland district #28 to form district #63, appeasing Flagtowners but probably leaving Campbellville residents disgruntled—the district did not reach their land.
The attached maps show the Moreland District, the Gohl District, the Flagtown District, and a rough estimate of the location of some of the desert schoolhouses at that time
Flagtown District boundaries and school picture
