Danish High Schools. 
23 
lected for the building and support of the high school. The 
school was at that time under a debt of seven hundred fifty 
dollars, and had reached the limit of its credit, and was still 
far from being well equipped. When the school opened Novem¬ 
ber 1, 1878, only nine of the sixteen students expected were on 
hand, and the total attendance during the five months’ course was 
only nineteen. The money received in board and tuition, four¬ 
teen dollars per month for each student, scarcely sufficed to pay 
running expenses, to say nothing about the salaries of Kirkeberg 
and Ostergaard. 
During the next year the contribution ceased altogether; the 
debt increased to a thousand dollars; while there was no increase 
in attendance. In 1880, Kirkeberg, after having expended a 
good deal of money on the school, reached the limit of his credit 
and that of the school, and was obliged to abandon the enterprise, 
broken in health, but still hoping and praying for its success, 
which he considered of the utmost importance to the welfare of 
the Danes in this country. The school now became the sole 
property of the Danish church society, and managed to struggle 
on with several changes of administration and ownership, as a 
Grundtvigian high school, till 1890. During all this time the 
attendance had not averaged forty students a year. It had never 
received any regular money support from the church, and on the 
whole its existence had been a most precarious one. Strangely 
enough, the failure of this school, situated as it is in the midst 
of the largest Danish settlement in the United States, did not 
deter the G-rundtvigians from establishing similar schools in 
places much less favorable. In the course of the next ten years 
four more such schools were established, one in Ashland, 
Michigan, 1883; one in Polk county, Wisconsin; one in Nysted, 
Nebraska; and one in Lincoln county, Minnesota, 1888. 
The school in Polk county failed immediately for lack of sup¬ 
port; while the others have always been considerably embarrassed 
financially, and the attendance at any one of them has not 
averaged thirty pupils a year. The total contribution by Danish 
laymen in America towards the building and maintenance of 
these schools up to 1894, aside from actual tuition, paid during 
the whole time does not amount to $10,000. Considering that 
