Laney School was one of the prairie schools attended by Dickinson County students from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s.

A former teacher and several students gathered November 8 with others to celebrate the dedication of Laney School #96, one of the prairie schools attended by Dickinson County students from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s.

Laney was one of 114 schools (3 made of brick, 8 made of stone, and 103 made of wood) serving 5,503 Dickinson County students, ages 5-21. The average daily attendance was 2,757 as many students were needed to help on the farm and couldn’t attend every day.

By 1959, the number of county schools dropped to 10.

Pearl (Watt) Lenhardt taught at Laney, the school attended by her father in 1882-83, when she 17 and 18 years of age.

“I enjoyed teaching at Laney,” Pearl said, “and I lived with the Meehans, who lived a quarter of a mile from the school. I had to walk to the school and arrive before school in cold weather to start a fire. One night I decided to try banking the fire the night before and arrived the next morning to find the building full of smoke.”

Lenhardt said she remembers all of her students and their accomplishments and their tragedies, including the Moyer boys who lost their mother at a young age. She shared the story about keeping the Moyer brothers after school during Christmas season so she could send the Christmas tree home with them as she knew they didn’t have one.

“I had a nice group of pupils,” she said, “and when two of my students, Max Coup and Gerald “Sonny” Britt, took the test required of students before they could go on to high school and passed with flying colors, I felt like I had done a good job of teaching them.”

Along with sharing her memories, Lenhardt donated her grade book to the Talmage Historical Society.

Former students and a teacher celebrated the dedication of the Laney School marker.

Six former students, Mildred ( High) Sybert, Ralph Snyder, Dean Romberger, and J.W. Romberger, Shirley (Gormley) Gray, and Ron Britt shared their memories of attending Laney School in the early 1930s and 1940s. Carol (Pettijohn) Peterson attended to represent her mother, Ruth (Foster) Pettijohn, who recalled the Foster, Drake, Snyder, High, Romberger, and Bathurst students, and also recalled teachers by the name of Fanelle, Fred Schopp, and Harry Stewart.

The boys reminisced about the time they dug a cave into the side of the steep embankment next to Laney School. J.W. Romberger called it a den, and Ralph Snyder called it a hut, but they both admitted it was a place they tried to coax girls to enter. They both also admitted they were not successful in their endeavors.