| By Anne Dyni
Today’s attendance area for Niwot schools encompasses many square miles of unincorporated Boulder County. In 1863, when the county created the first school districts, two large districts served this area. Each was governed by its own three-member school board, which was responsible for building and staffing a one-room schoolhouse. District #6 served children living around the early town site of Burlington, south of what would soon become Longmont. Burlington’s enrollment totaled 30 students that first year. The session lasted only four months because of lack of funds to pay a teacher. District #7 drew students from the countryside around 81st and Oxford Road. The town of Niwot had not yet been platted, so its pupils were all local farm children. As in most early school districts, one teacher taught grades one through eight in a single classroom, which measured about 20 feet by 30 feet. A room larger than that was too difficult to heat with a potbelly stove and students in the back would have had difficulty reading the blackboard. In theory, no child had to walk more than two miles to school, but some children attending the Niwot school lived as far away as the base of the foothills to the west. Therefore, in 1867, Niwot District #7 was divided in two and Bader District #13 was created to serve those students living closer to the foothills. Within five years, two more districts were formed to ease Left Hand Valley’s enrollment crunch: Batchelder #20 at Monarch Road and 63rd Street and Ryssby #26 a few miles further north. By 1880, Beasley District #42 was established east of Niwot along Niwot Road. A total of five districts now served the Left Hand Valley. Eventually, the one-room schoolhouses were outgrown. Additional classrooms were added or larger and more substantial buildings were constructed to replace them. Niwot was an established community by this time, so, its school board chose to build a new school in town on Niwot Road at Franklin Street. Old timers are quick to point out that Niwot Road was just a dirt lane in those days and had no name at all. In all probability, the previous schoolhouse was hauled away to be used as a farm outbuilding somewhere. Few such frame structures were ever torn down...merely recycled. When classes in the second school became overcrowded, a larger two-story building was erected on a site northwest of Niwot. According to several oral histories on the subject, the abandoned schoolhouse on Niwot Road became a teacherage or was occasionally used for overflow classrooms. Niwot’s newest schoolhouse was 
occupied until the 1960s, when district consolidation closed most rural
schools in Boulder County. All the original districts were dissolved
when the St. Vrain and Boulder Valley school districts were created.
Fond memories live on in the minds of many of Niwot’s former students.
Allen Bolton recalled tricking a new student into participating in a “snipe hunt” one year. The poor boy spent an hour crouched with his gunnysack behind the schoolhouse waiting for the other boys to “flush out a snipe” for him to bag. His classmates finally rescued him amid laughter at his gullibility. Toots Conilogue’s pranks were a real crowd-pleaser each time he scaled the two-story brick walls of the schoolhouse to reach the bell tower. One can only imagine his satisfaction as he looked down on the enraged principal below who was shouting for him to come down. Evan Gould described the principal, Mrs. Love, as a heavy-set woman who sprouted red spots on the back of her neck when she was riled. “The next thing, she’d say ‘I’m gonna cut your tongue out and hang it on the clothesline to dry,’” he recalled. “And boy, I think us kids all believed that, too.” Photo courtesy of the Isabel Knaus Collection 
Although another classroom had already been added to the second Niwot school in this 1909 photograph, overcrowding still appears to be a problem. Photo courtesy of the David
Levick Collection
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