Editor’s Note – A longtime staff favorite, we decided to bring this story out of the archives for our newer readers. It originally appeared in the January/February 2007 issue of Nebraska Life.

Several years ago, I found myself on a remote stretch of road in the Sandhills. I had negotiated this sandy trail in Brown County only a few times before. The going was slow, as I paused to look at every box turtle, snake and shorebird I encountered.

Then I saw something that I hadn’t noticed before. “Was that a gravestone?” I asked myself as I stopped the car and backed up. Sure enough, along a fenceline stood a stone marker.

I climbed out of my vehicle and cleared away some of the grass. The stone was etched with an image of four buildings and the words:

LAKELAND SOD HIGH SCHOOL

1934-1941

COOPERATIVE EDUCATION

DURING DEPRESSION YEARS

ONLY KNOWN HIGH SCHOOL OF SOD

I saw no evidence of any old school. Other than the narrow road, my vehicle, the fence, and the marker, I saw nothing manmade. At that point I thought the marker really was a gravestone – a memorial of something no longer in existence, something that had decomposed back into the earth.

Over the next several years I passed this lonely marker on many occasions. Almost every time I would stop and remove some of the grass in front of it. I felt it should be seen by passersby.

Lakeland High School was often in my thoughts. Although I knew nothing about it, I was proud that the little school had existed in Nebraska, if only for a few years.

Finally, I decided to find out more. Various sources indicated that there were many sod schools across the United States, but I didn’t find evidence of any other sod structure built as a high school. Conversations with local historians confirmed this. It didn’t take long to learn that though the sod structure was long gone, the marker I found was no gravestone. In a sense, the school lives on.

Ranching and farming in the Sandhills aren’t easy. Those ways of making a living were even more difficult during the depression years of the 1930s. Like today, the region’s schools were far apart, but with starving cattle, low beef prices and repeated crop failures, many families couldn’t afford to send their children all the way to Ainsworth or other towns to high school. Yet, those citizens – from an area of natural lakes in southwest Brown County known locally as Lakeland – knew that a quality education was essential to their children’s future. They gathered for a series of meetings and decided to build a sod school.

Sod construction was important to Nebraska’s pioneers, but by the 1930s the few “soddies” that remained were mostly decaying relics. That a sod high school was built in the 1930s shows that the pioneering spirit remained. People made do with what they had.

Construction began on July 20, 1934. School started Sept. 10, and classes were held in the unfinished soddie until it was completed on the 19th. Using sod from a dry lakebed, walls were built two feet thick to keep the building cool in the summer and warm in the winter. The school was plastered on the inside, had a wooden floor and, for lighting, windows on two sides. Even back then, the state had standards for appropriate lighting and amount of floor space per student. Lakeland Sod High School met those standards.

The school consisted of two rooms: a 15-by-18-foot classroom and an 8-by-15-foot room intended as a storage space, but which ended up serving as living quarters for the teacher. Other schools and local families donated most of the furnishings. The school library consisted of 60 books, but hundreds more were borrowed from the Nebraska Library Commission each year. They arrived in boxes from time to time.

Nearby stood two sod privies and a sod barn that could accommodate up to a dozen horses. Many of the students rode horses to school, some as far as 12 miles. One student had to open and close 14 gates between home and school. Students who lived farther away stayed with nearby families in return for helping out on their ranches. Some of these children saw their families only once a month during the school year.

First-year expenditures were kept to a minimum. The school’s first teachers, Elmer and Mary Holm, shared an annual salary of $450 plus some food and fuel – and lodging in the school’s back room. Textbooks and scientific supplies came to $35, with students sometimes selling pies to raise money for books. Fuel costs were only $15, mainly because several times a year, students, parents and teachers would gather “prairie coal” (cow chips). In preparation for winter, the dried manure was piled up to the eaves. In all, the first-year cost for building and operating the school was $1,102.60.

During the school’s existence, 33 students attended for at least some length of time. Eleven received their diplomas from Lakeland, and Francis Fletcher, now living in Ravenna, is one of them. I was relieved to track him down – more than one person told me they didn’t think any Lakeland alumni were still living.

Fletcher graduated in 1938, one of a graduating class of three. As a freshman, he started high school planning to stay just long enough for his older brother to get the family’s corn crop picked. But he had so much fun that he ended up staying in school, graduating in only three years.

He shared many stories with me and smiled and laughed with delight as he remembered each one. He chuckled as he told how the boys once ran a thin wire from the battery of Holm’s Model A to the windowsill where the girls liked to sit. There’d be a lot of excitement when the girls received a shock. Then there was the time they pushed Ted and Hazel Clapper’s Model A roadster up against the door to the boys’ outhouse and effectively locked teacher Russell Dybdahl inside. When Dybdahl finally escaped, he found all the students studying busily at their desks.

The students must not have tormented Dybdahl too much, though. He taught from 1937 to 1938, then returned in ’39 and stayed till the school’s closing in 1941.

Though times were tough, the boys still managed to scrounge up 5 cents between them to give to the mail carrier who came by each day. On his return trip, he’d bring the boys their nickel’s worth of tobacco. Fletcher used to bring his .22-caliber rifle along on the 5-mile pony ride to school. During the hour-long lunch break, the students would do some target shooting behind the school. Another student sometimes brought a high-powered rifle and spent the noon hour “looking for coyotes” – though Fletcher confided that the boys would bring their girlfriends along on these horseback hunts and that they never even saw a coyote.

One night the school had a dance. Two fellows from Kansas were there, and one of them got into an argument. During a scuffle over a pistol, a shot was fired through the sod roof. Fletcher said that nobody thought anything of it.

Winters could be severe. During the winter of 1935-’36 it snowed for 30 days straight, and the temperature often approached 30 degrees below zero. For more than a month, half of the students were unable to make it to school, but Fletcher said that school was never called off on account of weather. His father told him that if he ran into bad weather, just to let his horse’s head loose from the reins, because the horse would find the way home.

At last, rain returned to the Sandhills. Pastures greened up, and ranchers were again able to make a profit. Families could better afford to send their children to schools that provided sports programs, more advanced facilities, and a wider curriculum. Lakeland High School held its final classes in 1941. By then the soddie was showing signs of wear. It was abandoned and allowed to return to the earth from which it came.

The stone marker was dedicated in 1976 by the Brown County Historical Society. A few years later, a Nebraska Historical Marker was erected 7 miles west of Ainsworth along Highway 20.

Along with many parts of Nebraska, major flooding inundated the Lakeland area in 2019. The stone marker, usually obscured by prairie grasses, was submerged for months. The marker now bears the rusty stain of that natural disaster. Long Lake State Recreation Area, the scenic escape where I would camp during my explorations of Lakeland, has been sold and is no longer open to the public.

I can’t help but think what a great education it must have been attending that little sod school, where the curriculum included algebra and business arithmetic, English, Latin, geography, civics, science, economics and world history. Most people would probably say that students and teachers have it easier today. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s better. Fletcher believes students at these smaller schools received high-quality educations, and he himself went on to teach for several years. He also served in the military during World War II and farmed for many years. 

The era in which the sod school was born isn’t so different from what we’re experiencing today. We’re in the middle of a prolonged drought. Making a living in agriculture and other occupations can be difficult. Smaller schools close or merge, and parents have to make difficult choices about where to send their children for an education. Some kids are making very long trips (on buses these days, not horses) to get to school and back.

As our small rural schools close, towns lose part of their history and identity. Our once-close communities loosen according to changing school district boundaries. Perhaps a little pioneer ingenuity can make it work and provide quality education at the same time. I think it can be done.

That the Lakeland Sod High School existed at all is a testament to the indomitable spirit of Nebraskans – and in that sense, the school lives on.