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During its 75 years, Lincoln has worked up to an excellent school
system, with three high school buildings, three exclusively for junior
and 20 exclusively for elementary grades. It includes attractive and
ample buildings and high standards of education. There is little now to
indicate ordeals of past schoolboard heroes who kept an adequate school
roof over juvenile heads as Lincoln in its hasty growth trampled down
surrounding cornfields.
Lincoln’s first public school was held in Elder Young’s stone seminary
where The Journal now stands—Mrs. H. W. Merrill at the blackboard with a
babe on one hip. The seminary burned in 1867 and another stone
schoolhouse started at 11th and Q, partly the product of town-held
festivals and dinners. But the board announced when school began that
funds were exhausted and it would have to levy a “rate bill of 50 cents
per month, per scholar, payable monthly.”
Seventy years ago Lincoln schools showed not a trace of today’s pattern.
However, that year school authorities looked over their motley throng
and for the first time waved it into groups. Out went these orders in
the fall of 1872: “At the first ringing of the university bell all
scholars of the primary grade and those who will read in the first and
second readers and begin the study of mental arithmetic will meet at the
stone schoolhouse at the corner of 11th and Q. Those who will read in
the third reader ... will meet at the building on 12th street known as
the White schoolhouse. All prepared to enter schools of a higher grade
will meet at the building on O between 11th and 12th.” The stone
schoolhouse at 11th and J continued more or less as a free and easy
country institution, without all that citified grading.
But even in 1872 the high school which was to serve students at 15th and
N for 42 years had been started, and next year it was occupied. From
that date Lincoln schools looked up and on. The present building was
placed on its 15 acre grounds, J to Randolph and 21st to 23rd, in 1915.