250 Singing Valleys 



But it seemed to most observers that the cause of culture 

 in the corn belt was already lost. What was happening west 

 of the Alleghenies was a process beyond the understanding 

 of the generations whose metaphysics had never embraced 

 Mendel's Law. 



The New England stock planted in Ohio and Illinois and 

 undergoing that process of inbreeding had among its heredi- 

 tary genes the zeal for missionary endeavor. This gene would 

 seem to be on the distaff side. In the midwest it began to 

 manifest itself in the country schoolmarm. In hundreds of lit- 

 tle red schoolhouses, scattered across half a dozen farming 

 states, women teachers armed with Puritan consciences and 

 McGuffey's Readers, dedicated themselves to the cultural 

 conversion of the country's heathen youth. The majority of 

 the men who rose to positions of prominence in the midwest 

 taught school at the outset of their careers. They taught for a 

 livelihood while they studied law at night and dreamed of a 

 future in politics. But the women who became teachers en- 

 tered the profession with the holy zeal of nuns answering a 

 call to religion. These granddaughters of Massachusetts minis- 

 ters and sea captains brought into the district schools the 

 spirit of the evangelist and the discipline of the quarter-deck. 



Grandmother Webb was fourteen in 1849. That year her 

 father caught the gold fever and sailed round the Horn for 

 California. Her mother packed up the children and her goods 

 and went to live with her brother on his farm. At the Christie 

 Street School in New York, fourteen-year-old Julia Needham 

 had been the star pupil. The only one in the class who could 

 spell "Nebuchadnezzar" for the examiners when they made 

 their yearly visit, she had been promoted and was in line for a 

 scholarship at the Albany Normal College. The fame of her 

 scholarship went to the farm with her. Before fall term, and 

 long before the ship Samoset made San Francisco, the district 

 school trustees called on "Miss Julia" and offered her the 

 post of teacher. It carried a salary of fifty dollars a year. Her 

 duties were to teach all the children who might come to 



