Site of old country school now holds Mill Woods Town Centre
by Tom Monto (published in the Millwoods Mosaic Dec. 2024)
Shoppers at Mill Woods Town Centre may not realize the history of that location. But historic records tell us that the building is located on the site of the old Mill Creek School in a corner of the Morgan family’s pioneer farm.
The old schoolhouse was operated by the Mill Creek School District (number 355), one of about 3700 school districts that covered Alberta. There were about a hundred school districts in the Edmonton area. As you can imagine from that, each school district was small, covering perhaps 16 square miles. This was to allow pupils to walk relatively easily from their homes to the school and back. And most of these districts had just one school, with that one school being a one-room schoolhouse, with all classes conducted by just one teacher.
That is how Mill Creek School district was.
The original schoolhouse was built of logs in the pioneer era. This was a time when this part of what is now Edmonton was just being settled by pioneer farmers, many of them former Volhynians (Germans who had been living in Russia). Kids with such names as Minchau, Graunke, Busenius, Henschel and Werner were pupils at the school. Peggy Fried attended the school as a child and then served as a teacher there in the 1940s.
The Mill Creek School District was formed in the spring of 1895. The Morgan’s were farming the land where Mill Woods Town Centre sits today. The family donated a bit of their farm for a school. Little is known of the Morgan family. The family lived a hard pioneer life, and lived altogether in a small two-room shack with a dirt floor. [SES, p. 562, p. 922]
Times were tight, and local farm families voted down a plan to borrow $400 to build a schoolhouse on Morgan’s land. The recorded vote was ten votes against and only eight in favour, showing the small population base the district had to work with. (EB, June 27, 1895, p. 1)
Finally it was decided to build a school on a cheap basis. Each family with children was asked to haul two logs to the site, and a local carpenter turned the logs into a log cabin to serve as a school.
Within a couple years, the Morgan family gave up the struggle and sold thee farm to Gottfried and Wilhelmina Henkelmann. [SES, p. 562, p. 922]
Gottfried had been born in Poland in 1855 and in the 1870s had participated in a mass movement of Germans from Poland to Volhynia, Russia. He and Wilhelmina met in Russia and married. Being Moravian, the lack of religious freedom in Russia in the 1890s caused the couple to want to emigrate. And in 1897 they arrived in the Edmonton area. They soon were active members of the Bruderfeld Moravian Church. Due to his travels, Gottfried was fluent in Russian, Ruthenian, German, Polish and English. The farm later was owned by William Rentz, John De Smet, Ludwig Pipke, August Busenius and Otto Fuhrhop. The Fuhrhop family was the last to farm the land in the 1980s, when the City of Edmonton annexed the area and suburban communities of Millwoods replaced the old farms. [SES, p. 1912, 133, 562]
Education standards were not high at the Mill Creek School. The employment of only one teacher meant the teacher had to balance instruction in all the different grades. Sometimes older pupils assisted in teaching younger children. At one point the school held 75 pupils, all in one classroom. Boards were laid between desks to accommodate the overflow attendance.
The range of grades taught at first was limited, with not much if anything taught above grade 6. But as time passed, the grades taught were extended. The need for education in those early times was not great, with few pupils going on to what we now call the Junior High. Many stayed home to work on the farm and tend to younger siblings. This was especially true for young males. In rural schools, even as late as the 1950s very few men stayed in school to graduate from high school.
And attendance varied seasonally too. In spring and autumn, many children missed school to help with planting or the harvest. Charles Graunke recalled that attendance at the school dropped from 60 to just 6 at such times.
An outhouse (outdoor toilet) and a barn (to shelter the horses that the luckier kids rode to school) dotted the schoolyard. As well, the schoolyard held a shed to store the coal and wood burned in the school’s stove. A proper furnace was later installed, but in the early years, a simple “pot bellied” stove heated the school. Its fire would go out overnight, and even if someone came in early to start the fire, it would take most of the morning to get the school warm again.
The old log-cabin school was replaced by a wood-frame schoolhouse in 1907. It measured just 7 metres by 10 metres, and a local man built it for $900. Forty new desks were purchased, too at that time.
By 1919 the school trustees considered expanding teaching to include Grade 9. Around 1922, the school was remodelled, with a basement added.
By the 1930s some pupils were getting their grade 9 and 10 by extension courses (correspondence) with the schoolteacher assisting them as much as possible.
Peggy (Margaret) Fried taught there during WWII. Some of her friends were training as pilots, and one day they flew their planes so low over the schoolyard that Margaret and her pupils all scattered to the shelter of the school and nearby trees out of fright. She also recalled racing horse-drawn sleds to “the crossroad”, where Township Road 520 crossed Range Road 241 (the intersection of what is now 23rd Avenue and 50th Street). The old country roads built along the boundaries of sections of farm land surveyed on the bald prairie are the paved thoroughfares in today’s Edmonton.
The old Mill Creek District school finally ended its operation in 1955. By then the District had been merged with other small districts to make the Clover Bar School Division. This happened under the Social Credit government of “Bible Bill” Aberhart. Besides a fascination with money reform, his government believed in pushing through big projects and “school consolidation” was one area where his government accomplished what the previous Farmers government had been unwilling to do. That was because farm families had fought hard against consolidation – they did not want to lose the local schoolhouse and did not want their kids travelling greater distances twice a day. “Consolidation” though had benefits. As local schools were closed and instruction shifted to larger central schools, the quality of instruction improved and the course options widened for pupils.
The Clover Bar School Division built a large school at the corner of Ellerslie Road (9th Avenue South) and 66th Street, and the old Mill Creek School was closed in 1955. The new consolidated school was a far way to go, for a child living near the Mill Woods Town Centre, north of 23rd Avenue.
Now there are elementary schools right near the old Mill Creek school site. Ekota School and Meyonohk School are close by, as is the Edmonton Catholic School Division’s Ecole Frere Antoine.
For many years a reminder of the old Mill Creek School survived. This was a row of old pine trees planted by teacher Thomas Clark and pupils around 1918. They were the windbreak at the old schoolyard After construction of the Mill Woods Town Centre, the trees became a row of shade trees for a parking lot. They lasted a long time but in 2018 they expired from old age or the drought conditions that have plagued the Edmonton area recently. The Town Centre organized kids to plant new trees to replace those that passed, and the cycle was put into motion again.
Near the Starbucks at the Town Centre, those interested can see a cairn and plaque memorializing the old country school that once stood on the site. It is nice that something remains of Mill Creek School, once the hub of the area’s scholastic activities.
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Memories of the old Mill Creek School were recorded in the pages of the South Edmonton Saga; William Peter Baergen’s Pioneering with a Piece of Chalk and Schools of Strathcona County.
Other information was found online at:
http://www.edmonton.ca/city_government/documents/Mill_Woods_Town_Centre_ASP_Consolidation.pdf and provided by staff at the Mill Woods Town Centre.
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