At one point in time, there were well over 250 individual school districts between Goodhue and Wabasha counties. In the early days, most of these schools were held in private homes, barns, or abandoned claim shanties, which were temporary, rudimentary structures built by pioneers to legally prove their ownership over a piece of land. Between 1855 and 1885, settlers began establishing the very first schoolhouses, which were almost always one-room log cabins heated by woodburning stoves or fireplaces and without running water. Even later schools built in the late 1800s and early 1900s weren’t much more sophisticated, and it appears typical for their names to take after the family whose land they occupied or nearby landmarks.