School class photographs document the lives of children as well as the schools built to educate them. This is a late 19th-century portrait of students at the Glenn School, a one-room schoolhouse that still sits approximately two miles west of Lecompton, Kansas. Built by Swedish stonemason Chris Christenson, the native limestone school serves as the backdrop to the three rows of students. Here, siblings, childhood friends, and future spouses all appear together in one photo.
This photograph is part of the Lecompton Territorial Capital Museum's large school photograph collection, now available on KansasMemory.org, which tells the story of a historic Kansas community across generations. To learn more about the people in this photo and their descendants, see Treasures of the Township by Monica Davis at the Lecompton Territorial Capital Museum.
Funding for this project was made possible by a Kansas Digital Access to Historical Records (KDAHR) grant from the Kansas State Historical Records Advisory Board.