This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Forget the image of frontier schools you've seen in Westerns and on television: rough wooden benches and an incompetent school master teaching by switch. We Rock Islanders have always preferred something more refined. The first schools followed the first settlers to this area by less than three years. By 1850, Davenport could boast ten schools and Rock Island, five.
These were all private schools. Public education did not come to Rock Island until just before the Civil War, and public high schools not until the decade following the war.
Students had a wide choice of programs. In January of 1838, two years after Davenport was founded, the Iowa Territorial Legislature incorporated the Davenport Manual Labor College where students would work in order to "lessen their expenses and promote their health." Later that same year, Mariane Hall and the Reverend Michael Hummer opened a school for boys. The following year, the Misses Ohara advertised that they were opening a seminary for young ladies which would feature French and Italian. St. Philomena's Academy for Girls opened the next year at St. Anthony's Church.
Rock Island boasted a selection of schools, too. These included Alden Woodruff's Rock Island University (so elite that it refused admission to those who could not read), and D. J. Lloyd's Select Academy with a full curriculum of orthography, reading, writing, mental and practical arithmetic, botany, moral philosophy, and rhetoric.
The most ambitious of these school never opened. In 1855, Thales Lindsay, president of the Ladies College in Rock Island proposed using the island of Rock Island for a National University of the United States, with a complete program of civil and military studies involving "sixteen years of laborious study."
Perhaps we should return to advertising. If you saw an ad in the newspaper announcing the opening of Mrs. Lardner's Kindergarten class, with a full program of bugs, fish, rabbits, kites, games and snacks, wouldn't you want to go back?
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
