A Country Store: Henry A. Wilgus and the Rural Schools

            It felt freezing, below zero.  Henry Wilgus and his two kids May, eight and Bill, seven arrived at the little one-room school at nine AM.  The school was across the street from the High Woods Reformed Church.  The building still stands there today.  Henry arrived to find there was no fire in the stove.  Other little children were huddled together in the cold.  It would be some time before the room could heat up enough for lessons to begin.

            Starting a wood fire can be a dusty business, so the windows stood open while the teacher and an older student tended to the fire. This was the moment that galvanized Henry’s resolve to make rural education better for his and all the children in the community.  It was 1924, and Henry had been living in High Woods for five years. He was twenty-nine.

He was the owner of a small store and gas station and was in the process of adding a restaurant area with a dance floor.  His house had indoor plumbing, and was  properly wired even though electricity was not immediately available in High Woods..  Henry loved the country, but he had urban ideas about plumbing and a definite vision of sound education for his children.  This made him a city slicker, an outsider whose ideas were not worth “a row of pins.”

He bristled at being labeled an outsider.  He said his family had been in America for three hundred years on his father’s side and ninety years on his mother’s side, so he was not an outsider to American ideas.  Those who did not stand for good education were the outsiders in his mind.

            During his long struggle to improve education in the area, he wrote many letters and was often quoted in the paper.  His own words tell the story.

My own education was limited by the death of my father, leaving six children for our mother to raise.  This is why I have taken an interest in school matters and no one can alter my determination to do all I can for the children.

     He made up for his abbreviated formal education by being an avid reader.  He also studied mechanical drawing on his own and became certified as a mechanic.  He had the talent of quick scrutiny, so it was not a challenge for him to conclude that rural kids were being shortchanged by having to study in an unsuitable building. 

     Thus began his effort to build a new school in High Woods.  The new building would enhance and improve the community, and keep the local school from being swallowed up by the oncoming movement towards consolidation.  There was a chance that other bordering small communities such as Veteran and Daisy might join them to keep the elementary school close to the vicinity.

The fact that the children are required to attend school…requires that we should provide the agencies essential to the development of healthy, vigorous bodies, refined cultivated minds, good habits and morals.  Examine our school library.  There hasn’t been any money spent on library books in a good many years.

I wonder how far back one would have to go to find a high school graduate who received their schooling in this building. (June 28, 1927) 

Henry lost this battle when the vote tallied 22 for the new building, 29 against. However, He was not done.  Next, he began and, this time, won the battle for bus transportation for High Woods kids to attend high school.  Prior to this, few if any were able to go because their families were responsible for transporting them.  For some, a high school education meant living in a boarding house during the week, an expense not many country families could afford.  Because of his success, neighboring communities such as Blue Mountain, asked him for help in securing bus transportation to Saugerties High School for their children.  

There may be setbacks, but the American boy or girl raised in the rural sections is not going to be deprived of an opportunity of going to high school.  For a high school education is essential today, and is readily provided for the village and city child.

We have a hard battle.  Economy is the sign of the times.  Perhaps they will even try to do away with fire engines because there are no fires to put out, just as some folks don’t think it is necessary to educate children because there are no jobs for them.    (April 10, 1933)

            At one point, Henry received a threatening anonymous letter, and one signed rant from the Board of the Blue Mountain School insisting that he take back his statements, or there would be dire unspecified consequences.  This letter appeared in the paper to support Henry.  Its author is unknown because, oddly enough, the paper allowed it to be signed “anonymous”.

Anyone who knows Henry Wilgus is dead sure that no insinuation about lawsuits will frighten him.  He is an old fashioned battler in rural school matters, and he takes nothing from anyone, and those who think they can scare him have barked up the wrong tree.

Unknown, unknown, Shirley Van Bramer and May Wilgus, Unknown

 May Wilgus age 90 in front of the old High Woods School with her grandson Michael Stern