School District 35, "The Killough School"

Webster County's first school was taught by Miss Mary Kinsley in a little log schoolhouse at the Guide Rock stockade, beginning in May 1871, at a salary of $12 a month. The county's first three districts, at Guide Rock, Red Cloud and Walnut Creek, were all organized that year. By 1882, three years into District 35's run, A. T. Andreas counted seventy-five districts in the county, sixty-seven of them with schoolhouses: twenty-six frame, five stone, thirty sod and six log, serving a little over 2,500 children of school age.

What the plaque says

School District 35 "The Killough School" District 35 provided education through the eighth grade from 1879 until 1958. The schoolhouse sat upon Felix Alexander Killough's homestead, filed January 2, 1879, which adjoined the homestead of his father, Thomas Donley Killough, filed June 9, 1875, in this same section. The pupils were mostly Killoughs, especially in the later years. In 1928 the teacher was Loretta Britten and the pupils were Corrine, Donald, Esther, Fern, Pauline, and Thelma Killough. The school board was Samuel Killough, Thomas Donley Killough II, and Fred Schroeder. Descendents of Thomas Donley Killough and Felix Alexander Killough Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• National Willa Cather Center — 14 mi
  The restored Moon Block on Red Cloud's Webster Street, home of the Willa Cather Foundation, with the town she grew up in and wrote about laid out around it.
• Willa Cather Memorial Prairie — 18 mi
  Six hundred and twelve acres of never-plowed mixed-grass prairie south of Red Cloud, once Kitkehahki Pawnee country, named for the writer who said the grass was the country.
• Pawnee Indian Museum State Historic Site — 30 mi
  A Kitkehahki Pawnee village of the late 1700s above the Republican, where a museum shelters a lodge the women built and a family bundle carried out of Massacre Canyon and given back to this place.

More markers nearby

• Emmanuel Lutheran Church, 1904-1952 — 4.3 mi
• Cowles Consolidated School — 8.5 mi
• Republican Pawnee Village — 8.8 mi
• Catherland — 14 mi