By Jerry Harrington

 

The image of small, black-clad Amish boys and girls rushing into a cornfield to escape local school authorities is vivid in the memories of many Iowans who lived through the 1960s. 

 

The photo blazed across seven columns on the Des Moines Register’s front page in 1965 and was reprinted in newspapers around the world. It was one moment in a crisis marking a clash of cultures, generating heated political battles and fierce arguments among Iowans and others in kitchens, bars, restaurants and living rooms, pitting the ideal of freedom of religion against the right of children to a quality education.

 

And it was all generated by a few Amish families in Buchanan County. This is that tale.

 

Consolidation clash

 

The Old Order Amish traced their religious origin to Swiss Anabaptists during the Protestant Reformation in Europe. Many immigrated to the United States in the early 19th Century and some settled in Iowa prior to statehood, coming to Johnson and Washington counties in the early 1840s. Religiously conservative, these Amish shunned most modern technology into the 20th Century, transporting themselves in horse and buggies and wearing plain, black clothing. Almost exclusively farming families, men wore lengthy beards and women long dresses. One group settled in the Kalona area and, in 1914, a small faction broke off and moved to Buchanan County near Hazelton in northeast Iowa, claiming the Kalona group had grown “too worldly.”

 

In 1947, the Hazelton Consolidated School District was formed in Buchanan County as part of a statewide trend effort to standardize and improve primary and secondary education. The Amish families there decided to create two private one-room schools, employing state-certified teachers mandated under state law, but they adhered to the more conservative Amish curriculum which shunned science and other modern subjects. The teachers’ salaries — quite low by contemporary standards — were paid by the Amish families out of their own pocket. No religion was taught in the Amish schools.  

 

In 1961, a move began to consolidate the Hazelton school district with the nearby Oelwein district in Fayette County. School consolidation — nearly always a hot issue among affected families — created a larger tax base with a potentially broadened school curriculum. Both school districts were required to approve the move. It had overwhelming backing in Oelwein, but support was split down the middle in smaller Hazelton with many fearing loss of local school control.

 

Initially, the Hazelton Amish stayed out of the controversy. But Oelwein Superintendent A. A. Kaskadden, in an attempt to gain support from the group in the upcoming vote, approached them with an idea. Kaskadden proposed bringing the two rural schools into the public system by leasing the buildings, paying for certified teachers and allowing the curriculum to meet Amish standards.

 

Amish leader Dan Borntrager, representing the Amish families, accepted the arrangement. The Amish then voted as a bloc for consolidation on Nov. 8, 1961, providing the decisive factor in a close election and alienating many of their non-Amish Hazelton neighbors. 

 

The Oelwein school board, however, pushed back against the Kaskadden-Amish agreement; it declared the arrangement on teacher salaries and school building leasing was only temporary and opposed compromising with the Amish on mandated state school curriculum standards. The board protested against leasing the dilapidated one-room schoolhouses when there were perfectly good school buildings in Oelwein and Hazelton.

 

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