The other Spring Hill Ranch buildings
By JIM HOY
© Plains Folk
In addition to walking among the bluestem grasses and wild flowers and touring the interesting buildings at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, visitors also can hike a quarter mile north to see the one-room Lower Fox Creek schoolhouse.
Built in 1882 on land donated by Stephen F. Jones, the first classes were held Sept. 1, 1884, and the last students attended in 1930.
Dora Peer was the first teacher. Over the years average total enrollment for all eight grades was around 20 students.
The district, which was organized in 1879 by families living along Fox Creek, formally disbanded in 1947. Jones had stipulated in his original gift that the land and building would revert to the ranch if the school disbanded.
Although he had long since died, the property was returned to George Davis, who then owned the ranch.
In 1968 the Mid-East District of Kansas Garden Clubs (14 different clubs) took on the project of restoring the school as nearly as possible to its original design and condition. In 1974, Lower Fox Creek School was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Today, as part of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, the building is open to visitors and often is used by teachers who bring their classes to experience what education was like decades ago.
I never attended a one-room school myself (there were three rooms for the eight grades at Cassoday), but the desks, wall maps, blackboards, and other furnishings bring back memories.
An interesting bit of folklore associated with the Spring Hill Ranch is the legend of the tunnel that is said to connect the barn to the house, nearly 100 yards to the northeast. The existence of this tunnel is sworn to by some area residents who claim to remember playing in it as children.
The reasons given for the construction of the tunnel range from the prosaic (providing a way to get from one building to the other during blizzards) to the fantastic (that the tunnel was built to provide a stop on the Underground Railroad, a network of people and places that helped runaway slaves reach safety).
But the Civil War had ended a decade and a half before the barn and house were built, so there was no need for a tunnel to hide escaped slaves. This latter explanation for the tunnel may well have originated from the fact that when Jones moved his wife and four children to Kansas, they were accompanied by black servants, the Williams family, who before emancipation had been slaves in the Jones family back in Tennessee.
G.H. Williams (born in Tennessee) and his wife Isabel and their seven children are listed as residents in the Jones household in the census of 1880.
For whatever reasons the belief in a tunnel on the Spring Hill Ranch persists, despite the fact that no evidence, including sonar soundings, supports its existence. Perhaps the tunnel from the house to the spring house has been confused with a tunnel from the house to the barn.
I like a good legend, however, and I hope that stories about the tunnel continue to be told.
